According to a media report, the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor and judges who issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin have become the targets of a criminal investigation.
According to RT, the committee announced in a Telegram message that it has filed proceedings against ICC prosecutor Karim Ahmad Khan, as well as judges Tomoko Akane, Rosario Salvatore Aitala, and Sergio Gerardo Ugalde Godinez.
Khan had issued a plea on February 22 to the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber to obtain warrants for the arrest of Putin and Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, whom he alleged of being involved for the “illegal deportation of children from Ukraine”.
According to RT, the petition was allowed by the aforementioned courts.
The ICC prosecutions are “clearly illegal,” according to Russia’s investigation commission, because there are no grounds for criminal culpability. It also referred to the 1973 UN Protection of Diplomats Convention, which guarantees heads of state unlimited immunity from foreign country law.
Khan’s acts are considered a crime under Russian law for “knowingly bringing an innocent person to criminal accountability, combined with unlawfully accusing a person of committing a significant or exceptionally heinous crime,” according to the committee.
He is also accused of planning an attack against a foreign state envoy “with the purpose of disrupting international ties,” according to RT.
The three judges are being charged of injuring a foreign state representative as well as trying a “deliberately unlawful detention”.
Russia has dismissed the ICC warrant as having no legal foundation, with ex-President Dmitry Medvedev stating it was a symptom of international law’s demise. He also called the ICC “s**tty and wanted by nobody,” claiming it had a bad track record of holding high-profile suspects accountable, was clearly pro-Western, and had failed to examine US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to RT.
