Nobel laureate wants more to help probe Russian war crimes
BRUSSELS (AP) — A Ukrainian human rights lawyer who shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize called Thursday for more international investigative and legal help to deal with the staggering amount of war crimes cases since Russia invaded its neighbor almost a year ago.
Oleksandra Matviichuk of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties told a session of the 46-nation Council of Europe, the continent’s foremost human rights organization, that Ukraine had documented some 31,000 cases of potential war crimes since the Feb. 24, 2022 invasion.
But the glut of work the process entailed left the legal system unable to properly deal with most of them, Matviichuk said.
“The war has turned people into numbers. The scale of war crimes grows so large that it’s become impossible to recognize all the stories,” she said, insisting it remained essential to give each individual a sense of justice done.