75 years of guarding humanity: the universal, relevant and indispensable nature of the Geneva Conventions discussed at the conference with the participation of the President of the Supreme Court

It has been 75 years since the signing of the Geneva Conventions, but, unfortunately, the world has not yet learned to avoid wars. In today's reality, these documents may have some imperfections, but they certainly remain an effective mechanism to mitigate the consequences of war and a cornerstone of international humanitarian law.

The President of the Supreme Court, Stanislav Kravchenko, made the statement at the conference 'Limiting Brutality: 75 Years of the Geneva Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War' and thanked the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Ukrainian Red Cross Society for organising this important event.

The President of the Supreme Court said that since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, more than 141,000 criminal proceedings for war crimes have been registered. Of these, some 2,100 have already been investigated and brought to trial. 1,553 proceedings have been reviewed by the courts of first instance, 124 on appeal and 13 in cassation. The courts have thus already succeeded in developing a stable jurisprudence for this complex category of cases. At the same time, the judges are aware that any decision should be perceived by the entire civilised world as fair, based on international law and meeting the highest standards.

Stanislav Kravchenko noted that the courts have received 303 criminal proceedings under Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (violation of the laws and customs of war). This article contains a list of four corpus delicti, as well as the wording ‘other violations of the laws and customs of war’, so a prerequisite for qualifying an act as ‘other violations of the laws and customs of war’ is the need to identify the violated provision of an international treaty.

For this reason, judges are actively involved in the study and implementation of IHL in order to use international mechanisms to bring perpetrators of war crimes to justice and to compensate for the damage caused by their criminal acts.

The President of the SC stressed that Ukraine's ratification of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is an important step towards this goal, as Ukraine has gained access to effective international legal instruments that will help in the investigation of relevant proceedings and in establishing all circumstances of crimes and fair punishment of perpetrators.

In addition, it allows national courts to act in concert with the ICC and to formulate positions with reference to the practice of the International Criminal Court, in particular with regard to the qualification of certain criminal acts. Moreover, Ukraine does not have to start from scratch in this respect - national courts already have experience in applying the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union and also refer to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions in their decisions. This makes it possible to resolve controversial issues and problems that arise during the examination of cases.