War crimes, humanitarian journalism, and Europe’s migration policy

So Vladimir Putin has been indicted for war crimes. While some were surprised at the move by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, others had suspected something like this might be about to happen.

The scale and speed of the push for accountability in Ukraine is unprecedented, and many of those investigating have made it clear they are looking not just at actions on the battlefield, but at the people in Moscow who planned and ordered those actions.

What is Putin’s response to the international arrest warrant now hanging over him? A night-time tour of Mariupol. The pictures of Russia’s president driving around the city in the dark were at times surreal, at others almost pathetic. Not a single wide shot – that would have risked showing how total Russia’s destruction of the city is.

So what are the chances of Putin ever actually being arrested? That’s something we discuss, albeit tangentially, in this week’s episode of the Inside Geneva podcast.

One of my guests is long time human rights lawyer Reed Brody, whose book To Catch a Dictator describes in riveting detail what it is like to try to prosecute a head of state for war crimes, or crimes against humanity.

Catching a dictator

In Brody’s case the head of state was Chad’s former leader, Hissène Habré. A man, Brody tells us, who was responsible for appalling acts of violence, from torture, to rape, to summary execution, against his own people. Bringing him to justice took 16 years of tireless work, not just by Brody, but by the citizens of Chad who had been victims of Habré’s brutality.

It would be tempting, I imagine, to give up in the face of the delays and obstructions faced by Brody and his team – the case was passed back and forth like a hot potato between Chad, Senegal, and Belgium. But eventually Habré was convicted in Senegal of crimes against humanity – the first former head of state to be convicted for human rights abuses in the court of another country.

And that’s where it becomes relevant to Putin. No one, Brody tells us “is going to put handcuffs on Putin if he stays in Russia” – apart from the Russians themselves I suppose. But nevertheless the indictment is important. It means Putin will find it almost impossible to stray outside Russia without risk of arrest. Summits like the one in Geneva with President Biden in 2021 – a limousine and red carpet event Putin apparently loved – are a thing of the past.

The same goes for other Russians on the war crimes investigators’ lists. Universal jurisdiction means any country can prosecute them. “There is this entire system of international justice,” Brody says, which, he believes, will lead to prosecutions over Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

And that means, he hopes, that eventually another lawyer will feel like he did when he heard the court in Senegal deliver its verdict on Hissène Habré. “Seeing Hissène Habré in court I would pump my fist: my God we got him. But you never knew, and I have to say when they started reading the verdict it was such joy.”

More books

Brody is not the only author we interview on this episode of Inside Geneva. We also talk to Martin Scott, co-author with Kate Wright and Mel Bunce, of a new book Humanitarian Journalists which explores – exactly that.

As Scott tells us, covering humanitarian crises can be a thankless task. The mainstream media tend to focus on one or two big “newsworthy” situations for short periods of time. That, of course, has consequences for the victims of those crises.

“The more coverage of Ukraine, or the recent earthquakes in Syria and Turkey,” Scott explains, “the more likely audiences are to be aware of it, to care about it, to donate to it.”

Journalists who focus solely on humanitarian crises do things differently – they stay longer, they talk to more people, including local people, and they will commit their time even if the story is not conventionally newsworthy. Their reward for that is lower pay, less regular work, and a smaller audience.

As advertising revenue dwindles across the media landscape, humanitarian journalism, Scott’s book reveals, is often “the first kind of journalism” to be cut. A mistake, he tells Inside Geneva.

“We have escalating humanitarian needs, we have climate change reinforcing these needs. Over 330 million people around the world are in need of humanitarian support. So it’s no longer good enough, in my view, to say well, I’m afraid it’s just not newsworthy.”

Europe’s migration shame

Our final author on this week’s podcast writes, in harrowing detail, about the human consequences of “fortress” Europe’s pushback of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean.

Sally Hayden’s book My fourth time, we drowned, actually came out last year, but remains, tragically, just as relevant. Her motivation to write it came from working as a journalist in Africa, and then, one day, getting a message via social media from a young Eritrean man who had been locked up indefinitely in a jail in Libya, after being intercepted trying to get to Europe by boat.

Although, she tells us, she had known about Europe’s pushback policy, and the deal with Libya to return migrants there, she had never quite grasped what it meant.

“Suddenly you’re in direct communication with a person who is telling you they’ve been locked up indefinitely” she explains.

“They’re being tortured, they’re seeing people raped or seeing people die as a result of European Union migration policy. And that’s the moment when you go ‘wait a second, something has gone desperately wrong.’’’

Just how desperately wrong is laid out in graphic, shameful detail in Hayden’s book, and you can hear more about that, and more from Reed Brody and Martin Scott, by listening to this week’s Inside Geneva – so please do tune in.