Ukraine

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 21st September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, if anything ever speaks to the value of this House, it is when you hear a debate such as this, the breadth of expertise and the power of the contributions made. I pay tribute to everyone who has spoken so far. I will make specific reference to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, because he raised the matters that have been a large part of my work over the last year: war crimes and the crimes that have been committed in Ukraine.

Shortly after the invasion, President Zelensky was in touch with different leading lawyers and tried to create a task force that would get to work on the crimes being committed. Noble Lords will remember that at a very early stage, within a very short time of Russian forces entering Ukraine, we were seeing civilians being shot dead in the most grievous circumstances and horrific invasions of domestic homes, and we received evidence of sexual assault and the abuse of women and children.

I have been involved in the issue of legal accountability for the invasion and war crimes along with many distinguished lawyers from here in Britain such as Amal Clooney and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, a whole succession of King’s Counsel, and lawyers from the United States and Europe. The point that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, made about the monstrous abuse of the rule of law, abuses of human rights and the dismissal of the Geneva conventions and the rules of war is shocking beyond belief in many ways.

I will not detain the House by reciting and repeating many of the things that it has heard about the mountain of war crimes that have taken place—crimes that we somehow thought the rules would contain. That is why I so often stand up and remind the House that we ourselves have to be seen to be maintaining and respecting international law, because it is important that we can speak from that moral position when we come to address the greater horrors that are sometimes committed around the world. We can do that only if we can speak from the high ground of having respected international law on other fronts.

I want to talk about the challenges presented by this war. As many noble Lords know, I work with the International Bar Association; I am the director of its Human Rights Institute, and we work on the rule of law and human rights globally. One subject that we have been addressing is that, if there are to be trials for war crimes, they have to be conducted in a way that abides by the rules of due process and fair trial. That is very hard in war situations. Already in Ukraine there are trials of Russians taking place, and one wants to be supportive of the idea that those trying those cases are well versed and well inducted into international law and the requisite standards that must be complied with.

I pay tribute to the Attorney-General and one of our own judges, Judge Howard Morrison, who sat on the International Criminal Court but who has been involved in Ukraine on behalf of the United Kingdom, helping with the training of judges and inducting them into the standards of trial that there would be for war crimes. There is also the business of training prosecutors and defence lawyers. We must have defence lawyers who are willing to act in these cases, persuade them that that is an essential part of the process and help with the training of those lawyers, and the International Bar Association has been involved in that. The assessment and independent reviewing of those trials are also important—having a presence in the court to make sure that people are able to present a defence if they have one, and that the case is conducted in a fair and just way. Many of these issues are exercising lawyers just now.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, spoke about the importance of law in war. He said that this was a crime from the outset, and it was. It is a crime against the UN charter to invade another sovereign country in the way that Russia did. It was a crime of aggression. Efforts have been made, and we have still not concluded those efforts, to secure an international tribunal created by countries that recognise that this crime has taken place. At some stage there has to be a preparedness to bring Russia and Putin to account in a tribunal for that crime, in the same way as Nuremberg. That was created in an ad hoc way but was being prepared long before the end of the war, so we have to make sure that we have in place the right tribunal to try Russia for that initial grievous crime from which everything else has flowed.

One of the areas I have particularly been working on are the crimes which have involved sexual violence against women and children, but also against young men, and the abduction of children. I want this House to know that, before warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court, evidence was being accrued. It was so alarming that, here in the United Kingdom, we placed the woman who is the head of the Russian commission on children, who was very active and behind much of the strategy of taking children into Russia, on a sanctions list some months before the warrants were issued by the International Criminal Court. Therefore, Britain was alert to all of this and took important steps to sanction her.

Evidence has built up which shows that this crime is having a huge impact on the morale of families inside Ukraine. The noble Lord, Lord Harrington, spoke about the ways in which things have changed because of modern technology and how people on the front line can now be in touch with their families and give them reassurances—or the opposite—about what is going on. The effect on the morale of those on the front line, who know that their children have been taken, the lives of their families have been disrupted, and they might never be able to bring them back home, is huge; the effect on an army is huge. That was one of the reasons why there was such alacrity in getting those warrants issued—to show that there was not a passive response to what was taking place regarding the children.

I finally want to raise before the House—I ask this of the noble Baroness—the need for an international strategy and a much closer alliance across Europe on how we hold Russia to account for its crimes. This work has to be done with speed, and now. Has there been any headway in collaborating with other European countries and in conversations with the United States about the creation of a tribunal, as in Nuremberg, for the crime which we now recognise as a crime against peace—the crime of aggression?

The other really pressing issue is money. We have the frozen assets of oligarchs; their yachts are sitting, rotting in harbours in the Mediterranean. However, even if you collected all that—together with all the houses and mansions in Belgravia owned by oligarchs, which are currently in a frozen stasis—it will probably never be enough to deal with the horrors that need compensating, and the rebuilding of Ukraine. One is going to have to look at the money in banks—the state assets in the Bank of England, the United States banking system and the European banking system.

It will mean looking at our own state immunity legislation. Other countries will have to do the same if we want to be able to seize any of those assets or to force Russia to part with them in order to reconstruct the nation they have been reducing to rubble. Pain has been caused to so many people and lives have been lost. How do you reconstruct that and deal with the emotional damage, never mind the physical damage? There is a large issue here about how we deal with those assets. Legal ingenuity has been going into this, but we have to indicate a willingness to look at our own law and how we will reform it to seize those assets and put them towards the defence of Ukraine and its reconstruction.