NYT: Merrick Garland news flash!!

[bigtree]

25. another weak attempt to misinform

...this time with a strawman question.

"U.S. officials have previously said that the federal government will assist Ukraine's efforts to identify and prosecute war crimes that have taken place in the country since Russia invaded the region in late February."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/attorney-general-merrick-garland-makes-surprise-trip-ukraine-rcna34506


War Crimes and Accountability in Ukraine - United States Department of State
FPC Briefing
Beth Van Schaack, Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice
Office of Global Criminal Justice
Wednesday, June 15, 2022

The United States has been very active in supporting a whole range of efforts towards accountability for these abuses. In addition to our multifaceted work on security assistance, on sanctions, on humanitarian assistance, et cetera, we are working with civil society actors and others to document abuses for future accountability purposes. We are supporting the Office of the Prosecutor General in her efforts to prepare war crimes files and cases, and some of those have been proceeding now in Ukrainian courts. We have also stood up a Conflict Observatory, which will be scouring open-source information, including satellite feeds and social media feeds, in order to bring together and then analyze data coming out of Ukraine and using some of the tools that are within the unique capacity of the United States to be able to collect and analyze.

My particular office is working closely with the Office of the Prosecutor General. We had a project in place prior to the February 24th invasion in which we were surging some experts who are veterans of the world’s international war crimes tribunals to the Office of the Prosecutor General in Kyiv to assist her, providing strategic guidance and operational support in pursuing war crimes cases. The office is very experienced – she had already launched a number of cases arising out of the Donbas and Crimea – but since the relaunch of the invasion on February 24th, the entire country of Ukraine has become an enormous crime base. And so the work ahead of her is extremely daunting. We have now pivoted and are starting to scale that work in order to make sure that she has the resources and expertise that she needs in order to bring these cases.

We are also launching through implementing partners from the civil society sector what are called Mobile Justice Teams. These individuals will be multidisciplinary – again, veterans of the war crimes tribunals, experienced investigators and prosecutors, who will be working with regional prosecutors around the country as they bring cases within their particular spheres of operations. There will also be Mobile Justice Teams that will be thematic in terms of focusing on the use of starvation as a weapon of war, sexual violence against women of – and women and girls, attacks on cultural property. These are not crimes that ordinary prosecutors are used to doing in their daily lives, and so the hope is that having this expertise on the ground, in the field, will be helpful to enable these cases to move forward.

The United States is also supporting a range of multinational efforts to advance accountability. This includes cases that are being considered by the International Criminal Court. The new prosecutor, Karim Khan, has recently opened an investigation. I understand he’s in Ukraine right now working with local officials there to coordinate their efforts around prosecutions. We’re also supporting the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has recently relaunched the Moscow Mechanism, which will take a second look at abuses committed since the last mechanism was deployed. There is a human rights monitoring mission that has been sent out by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. I’ve just come from Europe, where I was – had meetings in Brussels, The Hague, Geneva, et cetera, to try and help coordinate some of these efforts. And there’s a whole range of civil society actors that are actively engaged in documenting these abuses from a trauma-informed perspective.

https://www.state.gov/briefings-foreign-press-centers/war-crimes-and-accountability-in-ukraine