On March 4, our Association’s expert Borys Babin took part in the meeting of the International Council of Experts on Investigating Crimes Committed in Conditions of Armed Conflict, which was held at the Prosecutor General’s Office in Kyiv. Deputy Prosecutor General Viktoriya Litvinova, adviser to the Prosecutor General Maksym Popov, head of the Specialized Environmental Prosecutor’s Office Borys Indychenko and head of the Department of the Office Oleksiy Bonyuk as Council’s secretary, the management of the “Renaissance” Foundation, as well as representatives of a number of environmental structures, such as “Greenpeace”, “Zoї Environmental network”, “World Nature Fund of Ukraine”, “Ekodia”, etc. took part in the event.
Among other things, effective forms of response by the Ukrainian authorities, by the International Council and by the civil structures to the initiative of the International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor, regarding environmental crimes, were discussed during the meeting. Viktoriya Litvinova pointed out the presence of 15 cases classified as “ecocide” in the proceedings of Ukrainian law enforcement officers, in one of which, in February 2024, suspicion was declared against a group of Russian soldiers in absentia.
In his report, as a member of the International Council, Professor Borys Babin described the Association’s achievements in terms of the study of the qualification of ecocide and the protection of the right to sustainable development and the environmental rights of the population of the occupied territories at the sites of the UN and other international structures, including constant cooperation with UN special rapporteurs. The expert pointed to the protection by the Association’s experts of marine and Danube Ecosystems in cooperation with authorized international structures and recalled the experience of participation, together with the Crimean Tatar Resource Center, in the UN Conferences on Climate Change in 2022 and 2023.
Borys Babin emphasized the importance of taking into account the phenomenon of artificial intelligence during the investigation of environmental crimes and stressed on the importance of the issue of global warming and proving not only the negative impact of Russian aggression on this process, but also the Kremlin’s intention regarding the corresponding inevitable changes in ecosystems.
