Thanks to your support and taking action, the appeal for the creation of an international war crimes tribunal against Vladimir Putin has amassed over 600 petitioners.
Haley Ott of CBS News on May 12, 2022 published an interview titled "Benjamin Ferencz is the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor. He says Vladimir Putin is 'certainly' a war criminal," and Mr. Ferencz concludes "certainly [Putin's] a war criminal."
Below is the full article.
CBS News, May 12, 2022
Benjamin Ferencz is the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor. He says Vladimir Putin is "certainly" a war criminal.
By Haley Ott
Updated on: May 12, 2022 / 11:54 AM / CBS News
London — As Ukrainian authorities and the international community work to meticulously collate mounting evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, the last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg trials of World War II-era Nazi officials told CBS News that Russian President Vladimir Putin is "certainly" a war criminal.
Benjamin Ferencz, now 102, fought in some of the most significant battles of World War II. He was a young lawyer, recently graduated from Harvard Law School, when he was assigned to a unit tasked with gathering evidence of the Nazi's war crimes in Europe.
"It was horror. It was incredible and indescribable. My job was to get into the concentration camps as they were being liberated, so by the time I got there, the SS was fleeing. The American army was chasing them, and the ground was covered with dead people, some of them still partly alive, pleading with their eyes for help. All of them looked like they were starving. It was not only an unforgettable experience, it was completely traumatic, and I always have that picture," Ferencz told CBS News.
He led a team of researchers that found a cache of German documents outlining the systematic mass murder of mainly Jewish people outside of the Nazis' concentration camps, in the towns where they lived. At the age of just 27, he ended up prosecuting 22 leaders of Nazi units at Nuremburg for those crimes. All were found guilty.
"It was obviously so horrible that you can't go away from that saying, 'Well, that was a one-time shot.' It's been repeated again and again, and it goes on today. As we talk, people are being shot and killed who had nothing to do with the war [in Ukraine]," Ferencz said. "So, evils that I sought — Nuremberg sought — to correct, are still with us today, and we have begun to build a foundation which is more humane and rational, but we have a lot more to go."
Ferencz has joined Ukraine's foreign minister, former world leaders, and legal scholars in advocating for the creation of a special Nuremberg-style international tribunal to try the leadership of the Russian Federation for the war crime of aggression, which is the act of waging an illegal war.
Ferencz said it would be an important move "not only in the context of this case… but to state the principle that you may not commit aggression against a neighboring state, or anybody."
In the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine — barring an extremely unlikely referral from the United Nations Security Council, where Russia has veto power — the International Criminal Court does not have jurisdiction over the crime of aggression, so a separate tribunal would be necessary for an indictment. And while culpability for other war crimes might not make it all the way up the chain of command to Putin himself, the crime of aggression could.
"Certainly he's a war criminal. You don't have to think too much about that," Ferencz told CBS News.