MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia’s children’s rights commissioner on Tuesday rejected charges by the International Criminal Court (ICC) that she was responsible for the illegal deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.
The Hague-based ICC on March 17 issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, accused of war crimes for the deportation of ‘children.
The court said it had information that hundreds of children had been abducted from orphanages and children’s homes in areas of Ukraine claimed by Russia. Some of these children, according to the ICC, were given up for adoption in Russia.
Maria Lvova-Belova told a press conference in Moscow that the consent of the children’s parents had always been requested, that the commission acted in the best interests of the children, and that it was more accurate to speak of guardianship than adoption.
She dismissed accusations that children were taken to camps for re-education, and the commission says it is not aware of a single case where a child in eastern Ukraine was separated from his parents of blood to be placed in a foster home.
Donetsk and Luhansk, two Ukrainian regions annexed by Russia, have asked Moscow to accept civilians, including orphans and children whose parents are missing, the Russian commission said.
Maria Lvova-Belova added that Russia had taken in more than 5 million refugees from Ukraine’s Donbass region, including 730,000 children, since the start of the conflict in February 2022.
A year ago, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan opened an investigation into possible war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed in Ukraine.
Separately, Yale University researchers released a report last month that Russia has detained at least 6,000 Ukrainian children at sites in Russian-held Crimea.
The UN convention defines the “forcible transfer of children from one group to another group” as one of five acts that can be prosecuted as genocide.
(Report Guy Faulconbridge, French version Gaëlle Sheehan, edited by Kate Entringer)
©2023 Thomson Reuters, all rights reserved. Reuters content is the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters or its third party content providers. Any copying, republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. “Reuters” and the Reuters Logo are trademarks of Thomson Reuters and its affiliated companies.