Playing the long game: Wash U professors highlight need for international justice in Ukraine

It’s been a rough few months for the international order. 

Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine has rattled Europe and the U.S., resurrecting worries of land wars and nuclear exchanges and Great Power contests that had appeared to be relics of the past. And in Ukraine itself, it has brought not just the death and misery of war but also atrocities that are breathtaking in their brazenness.

In this atmosphere, Leila Nadya Sadat and Kim Thuy Seelinger of Washington University in St. Louis now find their expertise to be in high demand. Sadat, a professor at the School of Law, has served as Special Adviser on Crimes Against Humanity to the International Criminal Court since 2012. Seelinger, a professor at the Brown School of Social Work and a visiting professor at the law school, serves as Special Adviser on Sexual Violence in Conflict to the ICC.

In interviews, Sadat and Seelinger said that ICC is now working behind the scenes to gather evidence of apparent war crimes in Ukraine, laying the groundwork for justice to prevail someday.

“International justice is a bit of a long game,” Sadat said. “It’s not a substitute for stopping the war. It’s operating on a completely different track. The short term needs of Ukraine are critical and overwhelming. The international justice part of it is a much longer game.”

Seelinger, too, sees justice on the horizon, if only the international community can maintain its resolve.

“Sometimes it takes a couple of decades to piece it together and have the right opportunity to bring the evidence,” Seelinger said. “It may be that Ukraine suffers in the short term and rises in the long term. Justice is always a possibility in the meantime.”

Sadat, who is the James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law, served as a corporate lawyer in France before joining Wash U in the 1990s. It was a time when international law was exploding in use after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. 

“Anything that had the word ‘international’ in it basically was in my teaching portfolio,” she said.

Sadat’s expertise led her to be involved in creation of the ICC through a statute adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome in 1998. She also is the director of the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative, which wrote the world’s first global treaty on crimes against humanity.

Seelinger is the director for the Center for Human Rights, Gender and Migration, part of Wash U’s Institute for Public Health. Her involvement with victims of sexual violence began when she was defending people from deportation in the wake of 9/11. As the only French-speaking lawyer in her office, she often worked with survivors of sexual violence in Africa. Before coming to Wash U, Seelinger taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she directed the Sexual Violence Program at the Human Rights Center from 2010 to 2019.

As Seelinger’s work demonstrates, the atrocities in Ukraine are highly visible right now, but they are not unique. 

“Let’s not forget that this is happening in many parts of the world, and everyone deserves our support and attention and assistance with whatever accountability efforts they can avail themselves of,” she said.

It is tempting to think the ICC can someday hold Russia to account, but as Sadat notes, its role isn’t to prosecute countries. 

“We prosecute people, and people are vulnerable even if they live in powerful states,” she said. 

Ukraine accepted jurisdiction of the ICC in 2014 and 2015. The court’s role at this point is to gather evidence and documentation that could be used at a later point, whether by the ICC prosecutor, Ukraine’s own prosecutors or potentially by another country asserting universal jurisdiction over war crimes committed on Ukrainian soil. 

Both Sadat and Seelinger stressed that the work of the ICC is painstaking and often necessarily slow. For one thing, building such cases is difficult even if the evidence of atrocity is overwhelming. Seelinger notes, for example, that a Ukrainian woman might know she was raped but has no idea who he was. Was it an opportunistic act by a rogue Russian solider? Was it a practice to which superiors simply turned a blind eye? Or was it a strategic way to sow terror that commanders ordered on the sly by telling troops to take a town “by all means”?

“How it’s interpreted is everything,” Seelinger said. 

Even once investigators have triangulated that evidence and built cases against individuals, the prosecutor can hardly just walk into the Kremlin with an arrest warrant. Instead, the ICC may issue indictments, often under seal, in the hopes that its subject will one day set foot in a country willing and able to capture him.

“If you were the ICC prosecutor, would you run around trumpeting the fact that you might be indicting that person? No,” Sadat said. “They’re armed and dangerous, and they will fight arrest.”

They are cases that take years if not decades. Seelinger, for instance, co-edited a recent book on the trial of Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad, who was convicted in a Senegalese court in 2016, a quarter century after he lost power. 

Of course, the long lag time between crime and punishment could also bring what Seelinger called “compassion fatigue” — an eventual loss of commitment by Western countries to take action. But for the moment, she is buoyed by outpouring of support for Ukraine, including the referrals for prosecution by 43 states that are parties to the ICC statute.

“It was really quite remarkable,” she said. “I think that, at least at this early stage, there is actually a very clear expression from the international community that the ICC is a relevant institution here and needs to get into the fray.”

Sadat agreed.

“As long as Western countries and ICC states stay unified and committed, there will be prosecutions,” she said.