Gordon Brown: The evil we are witnessing in Ukraine today cannot triumph. Justice must come

Police officers cover a mass grave containing 410 bodies of civilians in Bucha, Kyiv, last week as war crime prosecutors consider an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and his henchmen

On Friday we learned 1,620 visas for Ukrainian refugees seeking sanctuary in Scotland have now been issued and, with typical generosity of spirit, families here have already signalled their readiness to accommodate hundreds more in the weeks to come.

Our Easter prayer is that red tape can now be minimised to ensure more people have safe passage to Scotland over the coming days.

Scots are also in the vanguard of donors to Ukraine, contributing to the record £260 million that the UK-wide Disasters Emergency Committee has raised as a result of tens of thousands of gifts from the general public. Scots are responding to the resilience and bravery of the people of Ukraine.

But there is more we can do. That is why today I am urging everybody in Scotland to put their name to a petition which calls for President Putin to be put on trial for the heinous crimes he has committed.

Already, 1.7 million people across the world have signed it. The Ukrainian people deserve our support. While Ukraine’s buildings and lives are being destroyed by the day, the courage of Ukraine’s people has been indestructible.

While every hour hearts are being broken by the news of yet more atrocities committed by Putin, the unity of the Ukrainian people has been unbreakable. The message is being heard round the world: Putin may capture Ukrainian land, roads and bridges but he can never capture the hearts and minds of Ukraine’s people. Yet new atrocities – from Mariupol and the railway station at Kramatorsk – show that Putin is prepared to resort to even more desperate and barbaric crimes. This is why allies of Ukraine now have to extend sanctions and travel bans against Russia.

It is scandalous that weeks into the invasion many banks remain inadequately targeted and Russian billionaires can evade our new rules. We cannot continue with the macabre situation where the war is being financed by the £700m of payments the West makes to Putin’s regime for Russian oil and gas every day.

We are right to intensify humanitarian and military help. Thankfully we are now providing tanks and not just anti-tank missiles but even with all this Putin still feels he can act with impunity.

And that is why in addition to new sanctions against Russia and stepping up direct assistance to Ukraine we need him to know his war crimes will not escape international justice – and that he will not be able to escape the long arm of the law.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky and his legal advisers have resolved to request their international partners to support the establishment of a special international military tribunal to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed by Russia. And on Thursday, we published the text of a criminal indictment against Putin for initiating and executing Russia’s war of aggression.

Our charge sheet lists the detail and shows the gravity of the case that war crimes prosecutors wish to file before an international court. Our aim is that within weeks an international arrest warrant be issued against Vladimir Putin so he knows that if ever he leaves Russia he will be charged and put on trial.

Already at the request of 39 countries, with Karim Khan the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), Putin is under investigation for war crimes and for crimes against humanity including the targeting of innocent civilians through rape, torture and mutilation, the bombing of hospitals schools and public buildings, the breach of designated humanitarian corridors and agreed ceasefires and, if recent reports are accurate, the use of banned chemical weapons.

Last week, for the first time, US President Joe Biden accused Russia of genocide, a charge that historically America has been reluctant to make when ethnic cleansing has been alleged in other parts of the world.

But while the collation of such evidence to link Putin’s orders directly to this perpetuation of evil requires mountains of photographs, DNA and other documentation and will take months of painstaking and forensic research, the crime of aggression, that started some time ago with the planning and preparation of an invasion, can be proven by documentation that is readily accessible and fully available now.

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Aggression is Putin’s original crime as set out in the indictment “Prosecutor v. President Vladimir Putin”, prepared by American professors Ryan Goodman and Rebecca Hamilton.

They have modelled their charge sheet on the declaration made by Allied countries in London in 1942 when, in what led to the Nuremberg trials of 1946, they pledged to bring Hitler and his inner circle to trial for their aggression.

It was at Nuremberg that aggression was defined not only as an international crime but the supreme crime, the starting point for all the other heinous crimes Hitler committed.

While a gap in the law means the ICC cannot hear a case on aggression against Russia – neither Ukraine nor Russia are signatories to this statute of the ICC – a special tribunal can be constituted at the behest of Ukraine and supportive states. Today, we are able to announce that with the encouragement of the Ukraine government, 1.7m people have signed a petition calling for such a trial of Putin and his inner cabal. Signatories include 50 former presidents and prime ministers including John Major and myself.

Nearly 100 international lawyers and respected policy makers from every continent have now joined together to make this demand. Today, I ask you to join us. Just as Scots have played their part in this crisis by offering shelter to Ukrainians so, by signing our petition, you can stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine by insisting Putin stands trial.

Some say it is impossible to arrest these Russian war criminals but that is what was said in 1942 when the Allies demanded what became the Nuremberg trials.

Not only did international courts prosecute Hitler’s henchmen in the 1940s but in the last two decades we have brought war criminals in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Liberia to justice. Today the former Liberian leader Charles Taylor is imprisoned in a British jail after being sentenced to 50 years behind bars for his war crimes.

So it is time that message reaches Putin’s inner circle, warning them that we consider them liable for punishment for crimes in which they have been complicit. But perhaps even more importantly, an arrest warrant against Putin will send a message to the people of Ukraine that we will never allow war crimes to go unpunished or unprosecuted.

Let us tell the suffering people of Ukraine that just as the civilised world demonstrated its abhorrence of war crimes with its final verdicts at Nuremberg, the evil we are witnessing today will not be allowed to triumph over good.

Sign the petition: https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/prosecute_putin_loc/