Germany announces it will arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he visits their country
Germany has announced it will have to arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he enters German territory and if the International Criminal Court asks contracting states to enforce it, the country’s Justice Minister Marco Buschmann has said. .
On March 17, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian children’s rights commissioner overseeing the forced deportations of Ukrainian children. This made Putin the third sitting head of state to receive an arrest warrant from the ICC, after Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.
The ICC decision obliges 123 ICC member countries to arrest Putin and send him to The Hague if he enters their territory.
According to a statement released by the ICC, there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Putin is directly responsible for overseeing the forced abduction and relocation of more than 16,000 Ukrainian children since the start of the large-scale invasion. ladder. President Volodymyr Zelensky said the actual number could be much higher.
Russian forces illegally transferred or deported thousands of Ukrainian civilians to Russia, in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Putin is fluent in German and worked in the country as a KGB agent, surfing the Soviet Union era.
“I expect the ICC to quickly approach Interpol and the contracting states and ask them for execution,” Buschmann said according to German magazine Bild.
