How to Make Life Difficult for War Criminals

Ibrahim Olabi is a British lawyer of Syrian origin. He had always intended to pursue a career in commercial law. However, as Olabi says, fate had other plans. The war in Syria broke out in 2011. He immediately switched gears to studying criminal law and human rights advocacy in order to help Syrians. This particular conflict has become his life's work for the past decade. In his legal work, he has almost exclusively focused on this war. He has only made an exception for Ukraine since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion. "What Russia is trying to do in Ukraine, it has already done in Syria," Olabi is convinced, seeing the same warfighting strategy on the part of the Kremlin. He heads the legal team of the war crimes documentation initiative The Reckoning Project. In April 2024, the project team and a witness from Ukraine filed a criminal complaint for torture by the Russians with the Federal Court of Argentina.
Journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk speaks with Ibrahim Olabi about the choice of Argentina as the venue for the lawsuit, about Russia's identical "playbook" for waging war, how Syrians are trying to achieve justice, and how to make life difficult for war criminals.
This publication is made possible by the support of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in the framework of the Human Rights in Action Program implemented by Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union.
00:00 Intro
00:16 Episode guest - British lawyer Ibrahim Olabi
01:12 Podcast conversation topics
03:23 Why Olabi is involved in the war in Ukraine
08:34 Start of conversation with Ibrahim Olabi
08:46 Why the lawsuit for torture from a Ukrainian witness and The Reckoning Project was filed in Argentina
15:58 How the lawyers prepared the lawsuit and who exactly did it
18:25 What Olabi learned after filing a lawsuit in Argentina against the crime of the Russian occupiers
20:15 Why Olabi, who has been dealing exclusively with the war in Syria for over 10 years, started working with the war in Ukraine
22:54 About the trip of the leaders of Syrian civil society to Ukraine
27:11 Why Ukrainians and Syrians are being pushed against each other
30:12 About Syria's achievements in restoring justice to its people
32:57 How Ibrahim Olabi began to defend the Syrians
34:23 About the main types of crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine
36:12 About Russia's war tactics
37:14 How to break the main Russian argument about the deportation of children
38:49 Why cases of missile strikes are very difficult to investigate
40:57 Can we talk about genocide by the Russians in Ukraine?
43:18 About the use of chemical weapons in Syria and attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice
44:19 Why file lawsuits in a war crimes court, that can take years to wait for justice?
48:30 Outro
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#коливсемаєзначення #war #russiaukrainewar #syria #syrian #justice

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