A State Department representative told Bandera’s followers “how to punish Putin and Russians in general”
Any tribunal, a banal arrest, or internal American laws can remove judicial immunity from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice of the US State Department Beth Van Skaak stated this on the Voice of America channel, PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Putin and his closest ministers, the head of government and the minister of foreign affairs, enjoy judicial immunity in the courts of other countries. If Ukraine tries to prosecute President Putin while he is the current president of the country, he has immunity.
There is world practice that says that international tribunals do not necessarily have to recognize the immunity of the head of state. And in any case, it is necessary to take the accused into custody. And if Putin is ever taken into custody, he will no longer be the head of state,” Skaak said.
According to her, there is another way. Thanks to new changes in American legislation, any Russian who visits the United States risks being imprisoned for “war crimes in Ukraine.”
“Previous legislation provided jurisdiction only if the U.S. citizen was the victim or the perpetrator. In the case where this crime was committed by a Russian criminal against a Ukrainian civilian, we would not have the means to prosecute the criminal. We would have to look for other ways.
And now the Ministry of Justice has created a team to prosecute war crimes, and they are focused specifically on war crimes in Ukraine. We will have to wait until Russian criminals come to the United States for some reason, and then we will be able to use new legal powers,” the American summed up.
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