TrustHLT/LaCour huggingface dataset:
AP1 (Applicant): The suggestion is that international humanitarian law is the lex specialis, applicable to all issues arising in the context of an international armed conflict, and that the provision of the conventions are in effect automatically suspended for the duration of the convention.
AP1 (Applicant): And that the provision of the conventions are in effect automatically suspended for the duration of the conflict.
AP1 (Applicant): This ambitious and misconceived argument flies in the face of a clear consensus among judicial and academic opinion that international human rights law continues to apply in times of armed conflict.
AP1 (Applicant): I'm not going to go into the history of the development of this point.
AP1 (Applicant): But the question was confronted squarely and answered directly by the Grand Chamber in its 2014 decision in Hassan against the United Kingdom.
AP1 (Applicant): There, the court expressly rejected the United Kingdom's mission that in a state of armed conflict, the operation of international humanitarian law displaces the applicability of the European Convention on Human Rights.
AP1 (Applicant): Georgia would also point out that the Russian Federation has never relied in the course of its arguments on the derogation principles of Article 15.
AP1 (Applicant): All of the crimes alleged by Georgia thus involve violations of international humanitarian law, as well as violations of the convention.
AP1 (Applicant): There is no material conflict between the two regimes on the facts of this case.
AP1 (Applicant): We have analyzed in our written submissions each crime, each alleged violation, not only against the provisions of the convention, but also against the relevant applicable provisions of international humanitarian law.
AP1 (Applicant): And the result in each case is the same.
AP1 (Applicant): Mr. President, I turn now to the question of proof.
AP1 (Applicant): The court has heard oral evidence and received abundant written evidence from independent sources and eyewitnesses attesting to the aerial bombardments conducted by the Russian Federation.
AP1 (Applicant): At a minimum, that evidence establishes without question that Russian forces failed properly to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
AP1 (Applicant): At a minimum, even in those instances where there might arguably be said to have been a military target somewhere in the vicinity, Russian forces failed to employ methods and means of attack aimed at limiting collateral damage to civilians and civilian objects.
AP1 (Applicant): In some instances, regrettably, the evidence leads to the inevitable inference that civilians and civilian objects must have been deliberately targeted.
AP1 (Applicant): Again, I quote the OSCE's own contemporary findings.
AP1 (Applicant): They said this, although some of the bombing was aimed, some of the bombing was aimed at military targets, much of it appeared to fall indiscriminately on civilian targets.
AP1 (Applicant): That's the view of the OSCE at the time.
AP1 (Applicant): This court received oral testimony from local Georgian witnesses concerning the bombing of the villages of Eredvi, Kabi, and Tortiza on the 8th, 9th, and 12th of August.
AP1 (Applicant): It's worth just pausing to point out for those following the proceedings that those three villages were selected by the court itself as representative samples illustrating a much wider pattern of attacks on ethnic Georgian villages in South Ossetia.
AP1 (Applicant): In each case, both those three and the others, the pattern is the same.
AP1 (Applicant): Munitions were dropped directly on civilian houses, killing and injuring many civilians, or in town squares, or on churches, in clear violation of the principles of humanitarian law.
AP1 (Applicant): The attacks are corroborated by flight logs, photographs, and satellite imagery showing the damage.
AP1 (Applicant): They're also corroborated by the OSCE NGOs and a vast number of written statements, signed and sworn, that were submitted to the court.
AP1 (Applicant): The same pattern of attacks in Eredvi, Kabi, and Tortiza is shown to have occurred in 68 other towns and villages which had a predominantly or significantly ethnic Georgian population.
AP1 (Applicant): And this court heard the individual villagers themselves come and tell the court how the bombs dropped on their churches, on their neighbors' houses, and in the middle of a gathering in the village square.
AP1 (Applicant): There's no denying that the events occurred.
AP1 (Applicant): The question is how and why.
AP1 (Applicant): Despite the incontroversial evidence that these attacks took place, the Russian Federation has put forward no evidence and no explanation whatsoever to try to justify them.
AP1 (Applicant): That is one of the most remarkable features of this case.
AP1 (Applicant): Usually in war crimes litigation, the focus of attention is on the justification for the nature and extent of the force used against the target in order to determine whether humanitarian law principles were fully observed.
AP1 (Applicant): And that, indeed, is precisely how the court went about its task, requiring Georgia to produce evidence to demonstrate that a particular attack, in fact, occurred, and at the same time requiring Russia to identify the legitimate military target for that particular attack and to explain how civilian damage came to be inflicted.
AP1 (Applicant): Georgia duly produced the evidence establishing what in international criminal courts is called the crime base.
AP1 (Applicant): But when it came to Russia's turn to explain or justify or contextualize its military attacks, there was just a deafening silence.
AP1 (Applicant): The response of the Russian military officials who gave evidence to the court didn't even attempt to identify any legitimate military targets in the vicinity of the proven attacks.
AP1 (Applicant): Instead, they simply denied that these villages had been attacked by Russian Aryan forces at all, suggesting that all of the eyewitnesses who came along to testify and the hundreds of others who gave evidence in writing and all of the international organizations had made up their accounts.
AP1 (Applicant): The suggestions were, at times, preposterous and almost comic.
AP1 (Applicant): Russia even went so far as to suggest that the Georgian military might have bombed its own villages and civilians in order simply to implicate the Russians.
AP1 (Applicant): The one thing the Russian side did not do was to produce any records or provide any coherent account or explanation or witness or evidence concerning their actual military deployments or their intended targets, despite the court's specific and explicit request that that is what they should do.
AP1 (Applicant): If I have to choose one example of the Russian tomfoolery in this case to illustrate the point, I would focus on the Iskander attack on the Gori town center on the 12th of August.
AP1 (Applicant): I choose this incident because the evidence proves conclusively that the Russian side has deliberately set out to mislead this court and all of you, deliberately, offering explanations that cannot be reconciled with the objective facts.
AP1 (Applicant): Mr. President, we say, and looking at it in detail,
AP1 (Applicant): I'd ask you to find that if the Russian side is prepared to sink to these depths on this aspect of the case, then we respectfully submit that you can't afford to believe a word they say unless it is corroborated by solid independent proof.
AP1 (Applicant): They have set out to mislead.
AP1 (Applicant): Let me remind the court of the key evidence, paying particular attention to the sequence in which it emerged.
AP1 (Applicant): The court received a considerable body of written and oral testimony about an attack by missile on the square, civilian square, in Gori town center.
AP1 (Applicant): The square was hit by an Iskander SS-26 rocket that released cluster munitions.
AP1 (Applicant): A Dutch journalist called Stan Storemans and 11 other civilians were predictably killed.
AP1 (Applicant): This was an attack on a civilian center.
AP1 (Applicant): The missile also caused extensive damage to civilian property in the vicinity of the square.
AP1 (Applicant): And the cluster munitions it was carrying left characteristic pockmarks in the cobbled square, on the street, on the pavement of the walls that are still visible today.
AP1 (Applicant): Mr. Storeman's body was repatriated to the Netherlands
AP1 (Applicant): where fragments of shrapnel from the missile were removed from his flesh during a post-mortem operation.
AP1 (Applicant): The court heard from members of an independent Dutch investigation team that was set up to investigate this incident.
AP1 (Applicant): The Dutch team concluded, beyond doubt, from fragments that they examined forensically and from other evidence gathered at the scene, as well as from viewing and analyzing the video footage that showed the attack being perpetrated by Russian forces using the Iskander rocket, an item which is only to be found in the weaponry of the Russian Federation.
AP1 (Applicant): They were able to identify the rocket as being of Russian origin by its serial number.
AP1 (Applicant): A wealth of other evidence corroborating this attack has been available for some time.
AP1 (Applicant): And as with every other attack on a civilian target, the Russian side was asked to identify what its legitimate military strategy for shooting this rocket was.
AP1 (Applicant): And they made no attempt at all to offer any explanation.
AP1 (Applicant): They must know.
AP1 (Applicant): But they called no evidence at all about their use of the Iskander missile or their military deployments within striking distance of Gori on the 12th of August or put forward any legitimate military target.
AP1 (Applicant): At the evidential hearing, the Russian military witnesses just denied that Russian forces had any responsibility for the attack, notwithstanding that it was using a Russian rocket.
AP1 (Applicant): When asked to account for the shrapnel recovered in Holland from Mr. Storriman's flesh, they sought
AP1 (Applicant): to suggest that the chain of custody for his body must have been deliberately falsified and the fragments planted in his body.
AP1 (Applicant): Seriously.
AP1 (Applicant): When asked to account for the finding of the missile remains with serial numbers identifying it as a Russian munition, they absurdly suggested that the whole crime scene must have been fabricated for the propaganda purposes.
AP1 (Applicant): It was, I suspect, a difficult moment for all of us in court.
AP1 (Applicant): These are intended to be solemn proceedings, and the subject could hardly be more serious.
AP1 (Applicant): Yet here was the Russian Federation, a member state of the Council of Europe, seriously trying to persuade the Grand Chamber that the missile engine that had been photographed in situ in another member state of the Council of Europe was a plywood fake, a piece of anti-Russian propaganda, and that the hole it had made in the roof of a nearby property was all part of some rapidly put together fake crime scene fabricated to blame the Russians.
AP1 (Applicant): Plywood, seriously.
AP1 (Applicant): That was the suggestion.
AP1 (Applicant): The Dutch team, Russia argued, must be unreliable and biased, and the video footage showing the rocket incoming from Russian-held territory must have been doctored by some sinister hand.
AP1 (Applicant): This, then, was the quality of the Russian response.
AP1 (Applicant): This is how seriously they take these proceedings.
AP1 (Applicant): One is left wondering whether their officials have lived so long without a genuinely independent and impartial judiciary that they can't even be bothered to make up potentially convincing lies.
AP1 (Applicant): No need for plausible deniability, if implausible deniability will do just as well.
AP1 (Applicant): But then came the death knell.
AP1 (Applicant): The court has now seen an unassailable expert report that came into existence long after Russia had completely denied any involvement in the gory attack.
AP1 (Applicant): This expert report was prepared precisely in order to test Russia's ridiculous plywood excuses.
AP1 (Applicant): It confirms that the missile came from a stock, a particular stock, that had been designated for Russian use only.
AP1 (Applicant): It could not, therefore, have been planted, as Russia tried to suggest.
AP1 (Applicant): The central claim at the heart of Russia's case that the whole attack on Gori was invented and the evidence fabricated is thus conclusively proved to be a lie.
AP1 (Applicant): Important, because they knew that.
AP1 (Applicant): They must have known that they shot the Iskander.
AP1 (Applicant): And the Russian authorities, the Russian state authorities, must have known that they had records that they had discharged that Iskander.
AP1 (Applicant): And yet, they set out deliberately to lie to you about it.
AP1 (Applicant): As the court is aware, the International Criminal Court is now on the scene.
AP1 (Applicant): And they are currently conducting their own investigation into the Iskander attack on Gori.
AP1 (Applicant): The court has decided not to await the arrival of the ICC report before proceeding with today's hearing.
AP1 (Applicant): We can only assume that this must be because the judges are already satisfied on the evidence of Russian state responsibility for this attack, because the court's decision would otherwise be extremely difficult to understand.
AP1 (Applicant): As the court is aware, remnants of the missile have been available for inspection in Georgia since November 2007.
AP1 (Applicant): Subsequently, the remaining fragments were repatriated and have been available since the 23rd of April of this year.
AP1 (Applicant): I should add that in its most recent written submissions at annexes 11 to 16, Georgia submitted further evidence of the indiscriminate use of another type of ballistic missile, the Tochka USS-21, by the Russian side, which thus contributes to its relationship with the overall administrative practice of the Russian Federation.
AP1 (Applicant): Where does all this leave the court?
AP1 (Applicant): We submit that the totality of the existing evidence is not simply proof of Russia's responsibility for one constituent crime.
AP1 (Applicant): It is proof that the Russian side has not approached these proceedings in good faith and was prepared to peddle what Russia must have known to be lies.
AP1 (Applicant): Russian forces fired that missile, but the plain fact is that their generals came to this court to lie about it.
AP1 (Applicant): And there's a pattern here.
AP1 (Applicant): Every time we have direct evidence of an attack, including photographs, satellite, eyewitnesses, witness statements, oral testimony, and every time Russia is asked to offer some sort of explanation in military terms for what it has done, and every time Russia offers no explanation, instead just bandying about accusations against everyone else that they're lying and cheating and that the witnesses of little villagers have come to court to make up, put their heads together on grand conspiracy.
AP1 (Applicant): And yet the only party who can be proved to have engaged in lying and cheating this court in the course of this litigation is those who are responsible on the Russian side.
AP1 (Applicant): In addition to the four case studies selected by the court, Georgia has provided you with substantial and compelling evidence of the attacks on the 68 other villages, as well as direct military attacks on civilian vehicles and convoys escaping the conflict, and the summary execution of Georgian civilians on the grounds of their ethnicity.
AP1 (Applicant): All of these acts are in breach of international humanitarian law and amount to war crimes, but they also amount to a systematic violation of Article 2.
AP1 (Applicant): Likewise, the campaign of targeted burning, destruction, and looting of Georgian villages is conclusively proven by a consistent body of international evidence, as well as by numerous eyewitness accounts.
AP1 (Applicant): Witnesses testified to the presence and direct participation of Russian forces acting with Ossetian irregulars as they burned people's homes to the ground, randomly shot civilians dead, and stole civilian property.
AP1 (Applicant): Again, the OSCE concluded that a campaign of ethnic cleansing, in its words, had been waged by Russian and local forces together.
AP1 (Applicant): The same conclusion was reached by the co-rapporteurs of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, noting that Russian forces have failed to protect any properties under their control.
AP1 (Applicant): It would be astonishing if this court came to any other conclusion.
AP1 (Applicant): Astonishing.
AP1 (Applicant): Based on all of the evidence taken together, the government of Georgia invites the court to conclude that the Russian Federation adopted an administrative practice of causing or permitting the destruction of Georgian homes and villages in order to make them uninhabitable in violation of Article 8, Article 1 of the First Protocol, and the applicable rules of humanitarian law.
AP1 (Applicant): Each attack on a civilian object constitutes an individual violation, but the gravity of the overall policy lies in the systematic collective action taken against one ethnic group, repeatedly identified at the time by all of the relevant international organizations, as a joint Russian-South Ossetian campaign of ethnic cleansing.
AP1 (Applicant): In addition to summary executions and the bombing and destruction of Georgian homes in 68 towns and villages, Russian and Ossetian forces detained at least 160 ethnic Georgian civilians who had remained in South Ossetia or in villages along the administrative border.
AP1 (Applicant): The detainees were mostly elderly, and the overwhelming majority were detained long after the cessation of active hostilities.
AP1 (Applicant): Most were held for approximately two weeks in the basement of the de facto Ministry of Interior building in Skrinvali, in conditions described by Human Rights Watch as inhuman and degrading.
AP1 (Applicant): They were frequently subjected to ill treatment, including beatings and mock executions.
AP1 (Applicant): Some were ill treated during transfer to the center, others on arrival, and others repeatedly during the period of their incarceration.
AP1 (Applicant): Many were subjected to verbal and physical abuse, and some of them were forced to work in the streets of Skrinvali collecting corpses and burying them in mass graves.
AP1 (Applicant): One was told to urinate on a Georgian flag, and when he refused to do so, he was beaten by both Russian and Ossetian soldiers until he was unconscious.
AP1 (Applicant): The Russian Federation denies, surprise, surprise, that there were any Russian officials at this facility.
AP1 (Applicant): When the Georgian witnesses came to give evidence to the court and said, yes, there were, Mr. Swainston
AP1 (Applicant): accused them of lying, making it up.
AP1 (Applicant): However, as we've seen so often in this case, the devil is in the detail.
AP1 (Applicant): The most senior Russian general in the case, called for Russia, had made a witness statement several years before on the 30th of December, 2014.
AP1 (Applicant): And in that statement, he'd made the telling mistake of admitting that there were Russian investigators at the facility interrogating the detainees.
AP1 (Applicant): He put it in writing, and he'd signed it.
AP1 (Applicant): But they'd forgotten when they marked it the false case designed to mislead you.
AP1 (Applicant): Once again, the allegation made by Mr. Swainston in court,
AP1 (Applicant): two honest, genuine, civilian individuals who've been brought all the way from IDP camps on the border to Strasbourg to tell their story, were accused repeatedly of some absurd conspiracy.
AP1 (Applicant): The idea that they put their heads together to lie about those detentions and the involvement of Russian forces in them is obviously, I suggest, completely fanciful.
AP1 (Applicant): And yet, and yet, the Russian side is quite happy to bandy about allegations like that.
AP1 (Applicant): Because when you're desperate and your back is against the wall, when you have no answer to the case against you, when you can't provide an explanation because there isn't one, the last refuge of the desperate advocate is to call everybody a liar.
AP1 (Applicant): You will not be fooled.
AP1 (Applicant): So basing itself on all of the evidence, we submit that the Russian Federation adopted the administrative practice of causing or permitting arbitrary detention in breach of Article 5 and sustained and serious ill treatment of civilian detainees in violation of Article 3 as interpreted and applied compatibly with humanitarian law principles.
AP1 (Applicant): I'm moving towards the very last phase of my submissions.
AP1 (Applicant): Mr. President, I want to turn now
AP1 (Applicant): to torture and summary execution of prisoners of war.
AP1 (Applicant): The evidence shows that more than 30 prisoners of war were tortured after they had been captured by enemy forces and were ordered to combat.
AP1 (Applicant): I do not need to explain the extent to which that is in violation of the principles of humanitarian law.
AP1 (Applicant): Two of them were summarily executed.
AP1 (Applicant): One was beaten to death.
AP1 (Applicant): In addition to repeated brutal beatings, the evidence shows that one prisoner had his ear cut off.
AP1 (Applicant): Several were subjected to mock executions.
AP1 (Applicant): A number of prisoners were tortured with lighters, causing serious burns to their fingers.
AP1 (Applicant): Some had their fingers deliberately snapped, broken.
AP1 (Applicant): One was repeatedly stabbed in the leg with a bayonet.
AP1 (Applicant): One had his teeth removed with a pair of pliers.
AP1 (Applicant): One was subjected to strangulation with rubber straps.
AP1 (Applicant): And one was tortured with electrocution.
AP1 (Applicant): The court heard direct testimony from some of these men.
AP1 (Applicant): One of them told how he was detained by Russian and Ossetian soldiers acting together.
AP1 (Applicant): He could recognize the Russian soldiers, he said, by their uniforms.
AP1 (Applicant): And because they spoke with a pure Russian accent, he was beaten repeatedly in various locations and then handed into the custody of the Russian FSB.
AP1 (Applicant): So there's no doubt about who's involved there.
AP1 (Applicant): Two of his colleagues in detention were summarily executed.
AP1 (Applicant): Another testified about repeated beatings by Russian soldiers and corroborated the murder of one of his colleagues.
AP1 (Applicant): A third told the court how he was captured and held by Russian soldiers who repeatedly electrocuted him whilst he was being interrogated.
AP1 (Applicant): Again, he was accused of lying by Mr. Swainston, who
AP1 (Applicant): suggested that it wasn't possible because you'd have to have a different kind of implement when the man was standing there and testifying to this.
AP1 (Applicant): He lost consciousness each time as a result of the unbearable pain.
AP1 (Applicant): But each time, the soldiers would pour water over him to start the process up all over again.
AP1 (Applicant): There is a substantial body of corroborative and medical evidence supporting these accounts.
AP1 (Applicant): There is even a video showing one of the POWs, Georgi Antkalidze, beaten to death, which the court can find at annex 28b of our most recent written submissions.
AP1 (Applicant): For completeness, there are also videos submitted with Georgia's submissions on the evidence hearing, which show clearly Russian military personnel involved in the detention of POWs.
AP1 (Applicant): Based on all the evidence, we invite the court to conclude that the named individuals were tortured, as they allege, and that the Russian Federation bears responsibility for those violations of Article III.
AP1 (Applicant): We also submit that those acts of torture are formed part of an overall administrative practice.