Estrange omission by Ukraine in the tribute paid by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, to Robert Badinter, even though it was one of his last fights. Revolted by the Russian invasion and its procession of crimes, he wanted to establish the proofs and qualify them legally so that, when the time comes, their perpetrators would be judged by international justice worthy of the name.
With Bruno Cotte and Alain Pellet, he wrote a remarkable book, a rigorous and valuable analysis of the criminal responsibility of the President of the Russian Federation in his war against Ukraine: Vladimir Poutine. The accusation (Fayard, 2023). When this work was published in April 2023, less than a year before his death, Robert Badinter explained the reasons and objectives.
At the beginning, for him, was the dismay that history seemed to be regressing with great strides. ” I thought, he said, that the war in Europe was over after the collapse of the communist regimes in the East. I note with anguish, in view of past experience, that the embers always glow red” (Free MaineMay 29, 2023). So, once again, in the twilight of his life, he called for an effort of lucidity and courage. It is, he insisted, a “ war two and a half hours from Paris”, adding: “The fire is smoldering from a European war and it’s at home” (RTSNovember 29, 2023).
Robert Badinter remembered how, during the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, it appeared difficult to gather afterwards a lot of evidence of the crimes committed by Slobodan Milosevic (1941-2006) and his henchmen. He had drawn the conclusion, with regard to Ukraine, that the real-time collection of irrefutable evidence was essential to effectively feed the prosecution case which, he was certain, would one day or another be seized by the international justice. An important step has already been taken with the issuance, by the International Criminal Court, of an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for “children’s rights” ( !), for this crime which constitutes the kidnapping of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, their deportation and their forced Russification.
Lying alibis
Robert Badinter wanted justice to definitively deconstruct the lying alibis put forward by the Kremlin dictator (such as the “genocide” supposedly perpetrated against Russian-speaking Ukrainians, the first to be bombed and martyred by Russian troops), as well as revisionism and historical negationism parrying the invasion with the pretext of ” self-defense “.
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