The Media Initiative for Human Rights and the Human Rights Research League addressed the UN Human Rights Council with a joint statement. Human rights defenders are urging the international community to create a global mechanism that will make it impossible to recognize Russian court decisions regarding Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians.
This was reported on the MIPL website.
It concerns the verdicts that Russian courts and sham courts in the occupied territories are issuing en masse against Ukrainian citizens in cases related to the war. Such “trials” are accompanied by gross violations of international law. People are tried on the basis of fabricated evidence, testimony obtained under torture and pressure, and are deprived of the right to adequate legal defense. In addition, defendants are often illegally transferred from temporarily occupied territories to the Russian Federation.
Human rights defenders emphasize that Russia may try to use these illegal verdicts on the international level — through Interpol, extradition requests, or mechanisms of legal assistance from other states. To prevent this, governments around the world are calling on others not to automatically recognize Russian court decisions and not to use them as a basis for detention or international arrest of Ukrainians.
Recognition of such verdicts abroad would amount to legitimizing war crimes and crimes against humanity, since the Russian judicial system in these cases is not justice but exclusively an instrument of political and military persecution.