BRUSSELS, January 20. /TASS/. Any attempt by the European Parliament or other EU institution to establish a tribunal against Russia bypassing the UN Security Council are doomed to fail, the Russian Permanent Mission to the European Union said in a comment.
"We would like to remind European lawmakers that neither the European Union nor its member states have the powers to create an international court for criminal prosecution of leaders of third countries, vested with immunity in accordance with the international law. Only the UN Security Council, which bears the principal responsibility for maintaining international security and peace, has the exclusive authority to do so. EU attempts to create an international tribunal bypassing the UN Security Council are doomed to fail. Brussels understands it perfectly well, but chooses to thoroughly hush it up," the Russian diplomatic mission said on Thursday.
"Brussels keeps inventing its own rules in defiance of mutually acceptable norms of the international law," the document says. "Clearly, this European Parliament’s initiative and earlier ideas voiced by the European Commission are absolutely illegitimate. However, EU officials do not see this as an obstacle for their attempts to put more pressure on our country."
Earlier, the European Parliament called on the EU "in close cooperation with Ukraine and the international community to push for the creation of a special international tribunal to prosecute Russia’s political and military leadership and its allies," according to a press release following the vote (472 voted in favor of the resolution, 19 opposed it, 33 abstained). The resolution also calls for such a tribunal to be empowered to investigate the leadership of Belarus.
The MEPs recommended the European Commission, the European Council and the EU states "to engage in discussion on the legal possibility of using sovereign assets of the Russian state as reparations for the violations of international law by Russia in Ukraine, including potentially by denying such assets the protections of sovereign immunity or limiting such protections owing to the gross nature of these violations."
The European Parliament’s resolutions have no legal force and are advisory in nature, but they are widely used in the media and political environment of the EU to promote and disseminate specific political viewpoints.