Ukrainian human rights activists submit submissions to ICC on five Russian propagandists

The petition implicates five Russian propagandists and the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Russian Presidential Administration, Alexei Gromov. The presentation of this submission took place at the Ukraine-Uninform Media Centre.

"The ICC has received our submission on the situation in Ukraine. This submission was prepared by our partners in Ukraine, including the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, as well as a Russian NGO whose name I cannot disclose. It concerns five key Russian propagandists who are accused of hate speech under Article 7 of the Rome Statute," said Ilya Nuzov, Director of International Justice at FIDH.

According to him, the submission refers to the responsibility of five leading Russian propagandists for inciting hatred against Ukrainians: Vladimir Solovyov, Margarita Simonyan, Dmitry Kiselyov, Dmitry Medvedev and Sergey Mardan. The submission also calls for Gromov's responsibility.

"Gromov, the first deputy head of the office of the President of the Russian Federation..., is also responsible for the spread of these messages of hatred. Or, at least, as the architect of this hate campaign, he does not interfere with their activities," Nuzov said.

The authors of the submission analysed 526 hours of broadcasting and selected more than 300 statements that meet the criteria of hate speech.

"For each of these people, we specified in the submission about 5-7 main narratives that this or that person constantly promoted. For some, more, for some, less. But all of them definitely have calls for violence and so on," said Volodymyr Yavorsky, programme director of the Center for Civil Liberties.

According to the FIDH representative, this group of people is only representative, as stated in this submission.

"Of course, this is not a closed list. We continue our monitoring and we know that the propaganda machine in Russia is very large and that there are many more such individuals," Nuzov said.

Yavorsky noted that it is very important that the ICC launches this investigation.

"It is important for the ICC to show that this is a crime, that this is not normal, because now it is presented as freedom of speech, that they [Russians] are not doing anything wrong, that they are just expressing their opinion. This presentation is one of the important steps that shows that this is "freedom of speech" that leads to tens of thousands of crimes. We show this direct connection between the two," said the representative of the CSO.

According to the programme director of the Centre for Civil Liberties, the text of the submission will be made public only partially - due to the presence of sensitive materials on which the safety of certain individuals depends.

Yavorsky noted that the open part of this document will be published on the website of the International Federation of Human Rights.

"In our opinion, this submission is absolutely justified. We look forward to a positive outcome. I believe that this will be the basis for the investigation, that it will be the basis for future arrests and bringing the perpetrators to international criminal responsibility," said Anna Ovdienko, a lawyer with the Kharkiv Human Rights Group.

As reported, on 17 March, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Presidential Children's Ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova. This was done in connection with suspicions of illegal deportation of people, including children, from the occupied territories of Ukraine to Russia.