Russian armed forces

A Dutch District Court's recent verdict that three commanders of Russian-backed forces were guilty of downing Flight MH17 on July 17, 2014, and murdering ...

The court and the prosecution point to the large number of victims (298) and to the relatives and others who suffered their loss (thousands). [Many other proceedings](http://www.mh17.legal/) are yet to come in the case of the downing of MH17, including judgments expected soon from the European Court of Human Rights and the International Civil Aviation Organization. In that fight against denial and disinformation, law has an important role to play in debunking lies, on the basis of evidence, in a public court of law. The families of the victims were acknowledged and could tell the court about the victims and how the crash impacted their lives. However, the court determined that there was insufficient evidence to know beyond a reasonable doubt that he was sufficiently closely involved to meet the criteria of co-perpetration, nor that he was in a sufficiently high leadership position to stop the attack. And for the purpose of intent and thus the finding of guilt, it was irrelevant that they did not intentionally target a civilian plane. However, the court still found him guilty as a “functional perpetrator,” a form that has some similarities to international criminal law’s “command responsibility.” Under Dutch criminal law, a functional perpetrator is someone who has not physically perpetrated the crime but can still be considered the perpetrator if they prompted someone else to perform the criminalized conduct by virtue of their function and authority over others. Prisoner-of-war-status and combatant immunity are not (wholly) unrelated: one of the rights connected to prisoners-of-war is that they have combatant immunity for lawful acts of hostility. And the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court [ruled](https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/CourtRecords/CR2019_02593.PDF) that customary international law provides that Head of State immunity does not apply before an international court that prosecuted international crimes. The court rejected the reading that this provision extends combatant immunity to the suspects, because the provision (solely) addresses who is entitled to prisoner-of-war-status and not the qualification of combatants and their privileges and immunities. This District Court picks a side: it says that such irregular armed groups cannot on the one hand claim to be volunteers and to fight for self-determination independent from (prohibited) foreign support, and then on the other hand enjoy the privileges that would come with overtly partaking in those hostilities as part of those foreign armed forces. Even though Russia exercised overall control over the DPR forces, they were not part of the Russian armed forces, the court determined, because for the DPR forces to fall under Russian command and thus under its responsibility, Russia would have had to accept the DPR forces as belonging to the Russian armed forces and to take responsibility for their conduct.