Online Press Briefing with Ambassador Beth Van Schaack Ambassador at Large for Global Criminal Justice

https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/20241017_GCJ_VanSchaack.mp3

MODERATOR: I would like to welcome everyone joining us for today's virtual press briefing. We are very honored to be joined by Ambassador Beth Van Schaack, the Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice.

With that, let's get started. Ambassador, thanks so much for joining us today. Over to you for opening remarks.

AMBASSADOR VAN SCHAACK: Great, wonderful. Thanks, everyone, for joining. I really appreciate your interest in these issues, and thanks to the media hub for pulling all this together. I'm actually calling you from Vienna, where I'm hosting a workshop on protecting witnesses and particularly insider witnesses. But I've just recently been in Warsaw, where I was focused on justice and accountability and support for victims of atrocities in the context of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. So I'll focus on that, but happy to take questions about our work here in Vienna as well.

During my tenure as Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, I've really seen an incredible degree of mobilization of the international community around the imperative of justice for Russia's war crimes and crimes against humanity really being committed everywhere that Russia's troops are deployed across Ukraine. And I've taken many trips focused on trying to advance concrete steps towards ensuring that robust justice is being delivered for Ukraine and for all the Ukrainian survivors and victims of Russia's war of aggression.

During this recent trip to Poland, I met with government officials at the ministry of justice and the ministry of foreign affairs, and it's been remarkable to see the degree to which Poland has stepped up to support the justice imperative. They're playing host to thousands and thousands of Ukrainians who have fled violence; they're interviewing these individuals with an eye towards identifying victims and potential witnesses; they're looking across their own legal framework to determine whether or not they can bring cases in their own system; and they're considering discrete amendments to their penal code and their code of criminal procedure to better enable their ability to do these cases.

They're supporting refugees and they're providing security assistance. They also helped to stand up the joint investigative team at Eurojust. This is the network of international prosecutors across Europe, and it includes within them an international crimes unit of prosecutors that are specialized across Europe in prosecuting international crimes in national European courts. So Poland is very active within Eurojust, and also then within Eurojust, there is a specialized joint investigative team of some of the frontline states. Now, what a JIT can do is enable practitioners to speak directly with each other. So prosecutors working on cases in one national system can speak directly with prosecutors working on national cases in another, and it doesn't require going through a more formal mutual legal assistance process that may also be available through a network of bilateral treaties between European states. And so it's a really fast and efficient way for prosecutors to share information, to share strategies, to discuss ongoing cases and to support each other in the work.

Poland has also helped to create the Register of Damage for Ukraine. This is being stood up under the auspices of the Council of Europe, and it's a mechanism for Ukrainian victims and survivors to register financial claims of harm that they have experienced. The register has been stood up incredibly quickly. My office in the United States Government are supporting it financially. There's also a very senior American international lawyer who's on the board; it's a multinational board. And they've begun to accept claims by victims who will be able to register harms so that when there is a claims commission stood up, those claims can be adjudicated and various forms of reparation can be paid.

Poland was also one of the 40-plus states referring the situation in Ukraine to the International Criminal Court. The prosecutor has already moved forward now. There are six arrest warrants, two with respect to the deportation and forced transfer of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied and Russia-controlled areas of Ukraine into Russia and also then onward into Belarus, we're seeing - so that's President Putin himself has been indicted or is standing - is subject to an arrest warrant for that crime, and his children's rights commissioner, and I have to put scare quotes around her title since she's involved in essentially kidnapping, abducting children and subjecting them to nationalistic Russian indoctrination and military training. But then additional individuals are now subject to arrest warrants for attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure and other elements of the civilian infrastructure.

And finally, Poland has also contributed to a number of other relevant international investigations and has launched criminal investigations in its own system. All of these various elements are really critical pieces of an interconnected web of justice that together can combat impunity and be meaningful to victims. And it's important to emphasize that what we're doing now is really laying the groundwork for what will be an intergenerational, potentially, justice effort. Because many of the defendants and those most responsible may be out of physical reach right now, but over time they may become - they may fall within the jurisdiction of various international and domestic institutions, and the world's prosecutors and investigators are ready.

While I was in Warsaw, I also met with civil society organizations who are really active in Ukraine and Poland. They are very organized. They've created networks to support each other and to advance this work. These organizations and advocates are playing a critical role in documenting possible international crimes. They are undertaking very sophisticated methodologies, including using open source investigations - what can be gleaned from, for example, the social media accounts of potential perpetrators; what can we do about geolocating particular individuals, tracking the movement of munitions. All of this can be - much information can be gleaned from open sources. And all of this can then be shared with investigators and prosecutors around the world.

They're also supporting victims and devising recommendations on how we as an international community can collaborate to combat impunity and to enable meaningful justice for all of the people that are most affected by Russia's brutal war. And I really appreciated the willingness of these groups to travel to Warsaw to meet with me and to help share what they're doing and how the international community can better support their work.

In terms of my particular office, the Office of Global Criminal Justice, we have awarded more than $30 million in funding to provide capacity building and advice to Ukraine's domestic authorities, to provide financial support to other relevant international institutions like the Register of Damage or the International Center for the Prosecution of Aggression, and also to civil society organizations to advance accountability and victim-centered, trauma-informed justice for the atrocity crimes being committed in Ukraine. This includes $20 million to support the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine, which I'll talk about later. This is a joint initiative with the United Kingdom and the EU. And as evidence of our sustained support for this work, last month we awarded an additional $6 million across several other initiatives to further these efforts to support the Ukrainian Government, to support civil society, and then to enhance the work of international institutions.

This includes efforts to establish effective reparations mechanisms, to support access to justice for victims and survivors, and then also strategic litigation and case building for prosecution of crimes committed in the context of the war of aggression but that might happen in third states - in other words, states outside of Ukraine itself, which is very active, but where perpetrators may travel, where survivors now are living, having been given safe haven from the territorial state. All of these states may be able at some point to launch cases. And so our grants towards this strategic litigation is an effort to try and enhance the ability of third states to contribute to justice in support of what Ukraine is trying to do in its own system.

So I was in Warsaw primarily for high-level meetings of this Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group to discuss the continued cooperation between the U.S., the European Union, and the United Kingdom as we help Ukraine tackle the incredible array of crimes that have been committed on their territory. Our - my government has determined that not only are war crimes being committed virtually everywhere that Russia's troops are deployed, but also crimes against humanity, which constitute an array of different crimes that are committed as part of a widespread of a systematic attack against the civilian population. So two categories of crimes are implicated here, both of which fall within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court but also within many national systems.

The ACA is an essential element of the U.S. commitment to holding the Kremlin to account for all of the atrocity crimes underway and to ensure justice. It's one of three major pillars of U.S. policy towards the war in Ukraine, the first being to strengthen Ukraine's hand on the battlefield so that it's in a strong position at the negotiating table; the second is focused on addressing the unbelievable humanitarian crisis generated by this war and supporting all Ukrainian civilians and citizens as they suffer through another winter now under assault from the air and the ground; and then the third pillar is really focused on justice. And so that's where my work comes in.

The vast majority of the war crimes and other international crimes cases being - that are being developed will be handled by the Ukrainian judicial system. It is willing and able to do these cases, it is open, courts are open, Ukrainian investigators and prosecutors are working under truly impossible conditions as missiles are raining down upon them; and yet they are taking victim and witness testimony, they are building cases, and they're putting Russians convicted of war crimes into prison. This is really remarkable given that the war is ongoing. And while there of course is always more work to do, I just have to express my immense admiration for the Ukrainian system for all they have done to be able to advance justice in real time while at the same time trying to defend their country from assault.

And this commitment to justice is a critical part of Ukraine's democratic future, their future as indelible part of Europe.

So just a little bit about what the ACA has accomplished over the past two years. So it's providing coordinated strategic advice, capacity building, and operational assistance to Ukraine's Office of the Prosecutor General in the investigation and prosecution of atrocity crimes in Ukrainian courts. We have other projects that are focused on supporting the police and investigations farther upstream. It has deployed leading experts, many of whom are veterans of the world's war crimes tribunals, to provide training, consultation, and strategic guidance to the Office of the Prosecutor General and to partner agencies. These experts bring decades of experience in the investigation and prosecution of international crimes at domestic and international levels. So for example, one of the individuals who prosecuted the siege of Sarajevo before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, is now helping the prosecutor general and his colleagues prosecute the siege of Mariupol.

The ACA has also helped Ukraine's authorities restructure their operations and procedures to better handle this immense case load. They have registered more than 140,000 potential prosecutable acts. And of course, it will be impossible to prosecute every single war crime that has been committed. And so the ACA is really helping the prosecutor general to think about how to prioritize these cases based upon the available evidence, witness testimony, physical evidence including - as well as open source and testimonial evidence, and also the prospects of gaining jurisdiction over particular individuals.

The ACA have led over 130 trainings for Ukrainian authorities, provided advice on cooperation between military analysts and intelligence units as well as prosecutors to enable a successful prosecution of war crimes. It's also informed the prosecutor general's focus on victim-centered justice, which will not only be applicable in the war crimes context, but will really enhance the work of the entire justice system more broadly so that domestic violence cases, for example, will benefit from the victim witness support procedures that are being put in place in connection with prosecutions for war crimes and other atrocity crimes.

The ACA has also provided really specific focused advice on thematic crimes. So for example, gender-based violence, conflict-related sexual violence, or crimes that are being committed against cultural heritage as Russia attempts to erase the unique cultural contributions of Ukraine to human society. They've also provided support to regional prosecutors who are working out in the various field outside of Kyiv, who are often working closer to crime sites and under especially challenging circumstances. In this work, the ACA is providing experience and lessons from other national jurisdictions and international tribunals.

I also - I want to close by reiterating the United States commitment to justice for Ukraine, and noting that while there's still a lot of work ahead of us, it's really remarkable to see the kinds of steps that have been taken towards justice in Ukraine, but also in international institutions, and the degree of coordination of the international community to help deliver justice and ensure that impunity does not reign, even - all of these steps being taken even while this conflict is ongoing.

So with that, I'm happy to pause and take any questions from the group.

MODERATOR: Thanks so much, Ambassador, for those opening remarks. We'll turn to a couple questions we received from a journalist online. The first one is from Stefan Schocher, from Vienna, Austria. He states: "Ultimately, it's about the Ukrainian authorities documenting these crimes. And given the enormous number of cases, can you say more about the measures to strengthen Ukrainian investigators? And can you comment on systematic crimes such as the abduction of children? In particular, are there hints that a clear chain of command and preparations in this particular area exist or existed in the past?"

AMBASSADOR VAN SCHAACK: Yeah, for sure. Thanks Stefan. Great questions, and I'm loving being in Vienna. It's just absolutely gorgeous today.

All right, so two questions, the first being that issue of documentation. Much of Ukraine is now a crime site. And so if this were an ordinary domestic crime, you would bring out your yellow "Do Not Cross" tape and you would close off the area so that investigators can get in, can collect forensic information, whatever evidence might be available. It's increasingly difficult to do that in Ukraine because the crime sites are enormous. Entire towns have been destroyed. Entire buildings have been brought down by missile attacks. And so it's investigations of just an entirely different order.

And so much of what the ACA is doing is helping to support how do you translate skills that you have learned to use in an ordinary criminal law domestic context into this extraordinary new context of being under assault - from the air, from the ground, cybermeans, et cetera - and still collect information to an international standard so that it will stand up under scrutiny before a court of law.

And so it's everything from how do you interview witnesses in a trauma-informed way so that you're not retraumatizing them and having them speak multiple times, what kind of support do we give witnesses while they're giving their testimony; what conditions of even the room, how do you create a sense of agency to ensure that they're participating voluntarily, subject to informed consent, and have the kinds of psychosocial support and other wraparound services that they need; to the more technical side of things - how do you identify particular ballistics so that you can show that it was a Russia-manufactured or increasingly, as we're seeing, a North Korea-manufactured munition that was used in a particular attack; how do you prove that an element of the civilian infrastructure was in fact a civilian object that should have been immune from attack versus a military objective which is a proper military target - all of these are - can be very technical. And so part of what the ACA is doing is bringing that expertise from other national systems with a stronger experience and background in doing these cases and helping inform their colleagues and counterparts in Ukraine.

One of the really neat elements of the ACA has been field visits where we've brought Ukrainian investigators and prosecutors out of Ukraine and had them visit Croatia, for example, to learn from the Croatian experience, or they've come to the United States to meet, for example, with our specialists on environmental crimes; to learn what they can learn from these experts who have dealt with issues in other contexts, but also just give them a kind of a break so they get a sense to kind of breathe and not be constantly dealing with air raid sirens and this and that, but to also feel part of a community of practice. So that's a lot of what we've been doing on the investigative front.

You're entirely right, Stefan, that these really are system crimes. They're not a single incident that would be - that would give rise to a single indictment against a single individual. We're looking at a course of conduct, we're looking at a crime base that may involve multiple crimes. So you can imagine cumulatively charging something as the war crimes of murder, of unlawful attack against elements of the civilian - a civilian object or elements of the civilian infrastructure - and so teaching and working through what of these crimes can be charged under existing Ukrainian law. And they have a war crimes provision, but it's not necessarily consistent with, for example, the ICC statute, which has a very detailed scheduled of crimes. So helping to figure out what crimes are implicated by a course of conduct and how to charge those crimes, but then also how to prove them.

You obviously - we know horrible things have happened, but you need to have evidence that will stand up to scrutiny and cross-examination before a court of law that satisfies each of the elements of these different crimes. So for example, the abduction of children, you have to show lack of consent, that there were minors, where they were taken, et cetera. And we have to look at a whole range of different types of evidence - insider witness testimony, open source information. There's, for example, websites where the children have been identified as being available for fostering or for adoption, and so those websites need to be captured so that that information can show that they're in Russian custody and that they are being transferred - their guardianship is being transferred to someone within Russia or Belarus or whatever it would be. So thinking about how to translate skills that have been developed with respect to single crimes into more of a system crimes perspective is precisely what the ACA is designed to do.

MODERATOR: Thanks so much, ma'am. Onto the next question, this time from Momchil Indjov from Club Z Media in Bulgaria, who asks: "According to some information, Russian President Putin can travel to Brazil next month to take part in the G20 meeting. What does the U.S. expect from Brazilian authorities, taking into account the ICC has issued an arrest warrant or an arrest order against Mr. Putin? Will the U.S. sanction Mongolia for not arresting him when he visited there?

AMBASSADOR VAN SCHAACK: Right. Thank you very much. I mean, in principle any ICC member-state - and Mongolia and Brazil are both ICC member-states - owe certain cooperation duties toward the court by virtue of being a member of that particular treaty. And so that's really a matter for the ICC system to deal with, including the Assemblies of States Parties, which are the other 124 or 5 - I've lost count, because both Armenia and now Ukraine are making - have made moves towards ratifying the treaty.

So that's really for the Assemblies of States Parties to take up. The court has, in the past, looked at failures of cooperation by states when the former president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, would travel and occasionally would travel to ICC member-states. And so the court and the Assemblies of States Parties would take that up.

We have discouraged all states from inviting President Putin or according him any kind of a red-carpet treatment, because we should not be giving him a platform after he's so blatantly violated the UN Charter and all of the principles of international peace and security that we hold dear and that we, as an international community, have worked hard to establish since the World War II period. And so he shouldn't be invited to these gatherings. Easily Russia could send someone else.

Now, what we also have seen is that there's a fair amount of smoke around potential visits. So when the BRICS meeting was happening in South Africa, there was a question of whether he was going to travel there, and it was clear that civil society mobilized. They have an independent judiciary and an independent legal system, and so the government couldn't necessarily guarantee that he wouldn't have been subject to some sort of legal process were he to step foot in South Africa.

And already, there was juris prudence emerging from South African courts when Omar al-Bashir traveled to South Africa some time ago, saying that South Africa was under a legal obligation to arrest Omar al-Bashir and to transfer him to The Hague, because he was standing - he was under an arrest warrant for genocide and other international crimes by the ICC at that time. And ultimately what happened is that Omar al-Bashir did travel to South Africa but snuck out in the middle of the night on a private plane at an airfield with his tail between his legs, because it became clear that the legal system was mobilizing with him present in South Africa.

So even if the invitation is extended to ICC member-states, I - if I were Putin, if I were a lawyer advising Putin, I would tell him to be very careful about traveling to ICC member-states, because they have independent judicial actors, they have independent police and lawyers, they have active civil society members - can utilize the legal system in order to potentially compel it to act by virtue of those cooperation duties under the Rome Statute.

So it remains to be seen whether he will, in fact, travel to Brazil. But there have been a number of other trips that have been sort of threatened or contemplated which have not come to fruition. So for example, the world's heads of state were invited to the inauguration in Mexico. Putin did not attend, because I think he just felt like he couldn't be sure that he wouldn't have been subject to some form of legal process. Over.

MODERATOR: Perfect. Thank you. The next question comes from Uk Lushi from IntTra. Very short: "What can you say about the special chambers of Kosovo in The Hague?"

AMBASSADOR VAN SCHAACK: Ah, yes, thank you. No, we have been long supporters of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, which is essentially a Kosovar court, but sitting extraterritorially in The Hague and benefitting from a hybrid model, where a number of international experts are serving in key positions in that institution. So for example, the chief prosecutor, Kim West, is a United States lawyer. We have seconded her, essentially, to support the work of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers.

It's extremely important that we continue to support that institution as an international community. It's adjudicating crimes from the war in Kosovo, but it's also contributing to the establishment of the rule of law within Kosovo. And so we're doing what we can to support that institution as it continues its work. It's got one big case moving forward, which involves the former head of state, but there are also a number of other cases, including cases involving efforts to undermine the administration of justice. And this includes cases involving potential witness tampering or witness intimidation. And so these cases are just as important, because they're about building a rule of law and a judicial system that's able to function without succumbing to outside pressure from individuals or entities that would not want to see these cases move forward.

MODERATOR: Thank you, Ambassador. We have another question now from Steph Maupas from Le Monde, who says: "You speak about support for international organizations - or this international organization. Do you also finance the ICC for its work, or do you support it in any other way?"

AMBASSADOR VAN SCHAACK: Yeah. Even as a non-party state, there are many ways that we can support the work of the ICC. We can do this diplomatically, and we attend the Assemblies of States Parties on an annual basis as an observer state. We can engage in information sharing, if there's information that we have that might support the work of the court, and providing operational assistance if they're working in a particular environment and our embassy is available to provide some guidance on threat assessment, et cetera.

So there are multiple ways that we can support the ICC as part of a larger system of international justice that includes other international organizations like the Commission of Inquiry that was established by the Human Rights Council, the United Nations Human Rights Council, or the Register of Damage that is being stood up under the Council of Europe.

It's all part of an ecosystem, and members of the international community should be doing what they can to support, whether it's financially or otherwise, the various pieces so that this ecosystem is healthy and that each of the individual elements can support each other in order to deliver a comprehensive justice for atrocity crimes.

MODERATOR: Thank you, ma'am. We have time for one more question, this time from Jelmer Kampen, who asks, in reference to the ACA: "Have there already been results? Have any cases already gone through with the help of the ACA?"

AMBASSADOR VAN SCHAACK: Yes, thank you. There have been a number of cases. So I think my numbers are current. There have been 17 verdicts involving individual Russian prisoners of war who were in the custody of Ukraine. That's an unprecedented number for an ongoing conflict situation, like through history. There have also been dozens of verdicts involving in absentia trials. So under Ukrainian procedural law, they are able to move to a judgment without custody of the accused. Not every system can do that, but Ukrainian law happens to allow in absentia proceedings.

So there have been many more cases that have been - that have proceeded against individuals in absentia, where they have the identity of the alleged perpetrator, they provide notice to that individual so that he or maybe she - but most of these cases probably are hes - so he can come and defend in person if he would like. Obviously, none of them have, and so then they proceed in absentia.

And then finally, there are another - hundreds of notices of suspicion that have been issued against individuals, identifying who those individuals or the alleged individuals are who are deemed responsible for whether it's custodial abuses or attacks on civilian objects, and then proceedings are underway to put together a full case and then eventually take it to a court to present it under the beyond a reasonable doubt standard. And then the court would ultimately rule, and then an in absentia verdict would be achieved.

So this is what's underway, in addition to taking hundreds of testimonies, building other dossiers that eventually will become more full-scale cases. So all of this work is underway, now as we speak. And as I mentioned, this is going to be intergenerational. So it may be a decade or more when these cases are still underway. If we look at the states of the former Yugoslavia, where the war happened in the 1990s, they're still adjudicating cases today in their special chambers. And so I imagine that Ukraine will be in a similar situation.

MODERATOR: Thanks so much, ma'am. Unfortunately, that is all the time we have for today. Thanks, everyone, for your questions. And Ambassador, thank you again for joining us.

AMBASSADOR VAN SCHAACK: Well, I just want to say thank you to all the journalists' presence. It's so important that you continue to cover this issue. I think Ukraine, even though they're under assault and none of that has abated - the world is a terrible place these days, and so they're - they've - the headlines are spread out through multiple different crisis situations and conflicts. So really great to know that there's still a high level of interest in what's happening on Ukraine and on Kosovo as well.

MODERATOR: Thank you, ma'am. Shortly we will send the audio recording of the briefing to all the participating journalists and provide a transcript as soon as it is available. Thanks again, everyone, for your participation, and we hope you can join us for another press briefing in the near future. This ends today's briefing.

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