Pot and Kettle: Former UK Prime Ministers Demand ‘War Crimes’ Trial for Putin

© Aaron ChownBritain Remembrance Sunday
Britain Remembrance Sunday - Sputnik International, 1920, 19.03.2022
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Gordon Brown and John Major both played key roles in taking Britain into wars of aggression in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan, where multiple war crimes were committed, but neither man has ever faced investigation.
Two former British prime ministers have demanded Russian President Vladimir Putin face a "Nuremberg"-style war crimes tribunal over the conflict in Ukraine.
Both Gordon Brown and John Major are among some 140 high-profile signatories to a declaration calling for a "special international war crimes tribunal" to be set up to "arrest Putin and bring him to trial".
Signatories include Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Benjamin Ferencz, a 102-year-old Hungarian-born jurist who was chief prosecutor for the US Army at one of the post-WWII trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.
In a column for Saturday's Daily Mail, Brown claimed "Such a tribunal would show we are serious and close off a loophole in international law that Putin could use to dodge justice" — although he did not explain how it could arrest the sitting head of state of a country which did not recognise its jurisdiction.
A recent online petition demanded the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecute the Putin "regime" for alleged war crimes in Ukraine, "as well as Russia’s oligarchs and his enablers". But, like the US and Israel, Russia is not a party to the Rome statutes that recognise the authority of the ICC, a court that has famously only ever prosecuted African leaders.
Over the past two weeks, the Ukrainian government has accused the Russian Air Force of bombing a maternity hospital and theatre in Mariupol, a city in Donetsk oblast occupied by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion of the Ukrainian territorial army, killing and injuring civilians.
The Russian Ministry of Defence has insisted it carried out no strikes on the city on the days in question and accused Ukraine of staging "false flag" bombings as a provocation. It pointed to media reports from February that Azov militants had evicted patients and staff from the hospital and turned it into a military strongpoint.
Brown drew a direct parallel with the Nuremberg tribunals, where Soviet military prosecutors led the charge against Hermann Goering and other surviving Nazi leaders.

"We must make Putin's collaborators aware that the noose is tightening", Brown threatened. "If they do not distance themselves from Putin, they face prosecution and prison".

"From Britain — which rightly prides itself on democracy and the rule of law — the message must go out. At Nuremberg we held the Nazi war criminals to account", Brown wrote, skipping over Russia's role in de-Nazifying Europe. "Eight decades on, we must ensure there will be a day of reckoning for Putin".
A fragment of an Ukrainian Tochka-U missile which had been shot down near the Government House in the city center during a recent shelling is pictured in Donetsk, Donetsk People's Republic. - Sputnik International, 1920, 18.03.2022
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Before becoming PM in 2007, Brown served as chancellor and effective number two to his predecessor Tony Blair from 1997 onwards. He budgeted funds for Britain's participation in three unprovoked military offensives: the 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, and the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Major was prime minister during Britain's participation the 1991 Gulf War. During that conflict, a US-led coalition air raid targeted the Amiriyah civilian bomb shelter in Baghdad, killing 1,500 civilians, mostly women and children. The coalition forces also left Iraq strewn with toxic depleted uranium munitions.
Neither former PM has ever been charged with or even investigated for war crimes.
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