Catastrophic failure

• In The Trial of Vladimir Putin, barrister Geoffrey Robertson answers that question by dramatising what might happen within the walls of a future courtroom.
• The question of whether Putin is guilty of aggression is fairly straightforward.
• Evidence would be needed that he is responsible in his role as a commander for actions carried out by subordinates.
• Instead, a special aggression tribunal would have to be established in the tradition of the trials of Nazis at Nuremberg.

• It is not pure fiction; it is speculation informed by Robertson’s experience.
• The details he imagines will bring these potential future trials to life for readers who are less familiar than he is with the inside of a courtroom.
• Does Robertson really need to tell us three times that any judgements should be uploaded to the internet?

Rhetorical devices

• Whether Putin should be tried even if absent is a hard question because there are arguments on both sides.
• Instead, he uses rhetorical tools such as hyperbole: if “international law is to have any meaning”, he writes, then a trial in the defendant’s absence “must be acceptable”.
• Robertson criticises this with the remark that it “entitles a man who has given orders to kill thousands to stand back and laugh”.

• It is that he gives the impression that the complexities do not exist.
• Dismissive language is a more general feature of his writing style.
• The implication is that Robertson is atypical among lawyers, someone who will sweep aside conventions and assumptions.
• Read more:
  An inside look at the dangerous, painstaking work of collecting evidence of suspected war crimes in Ukraine

The United Nations

• One of the bolder elements in the book is what Robertson says about the United Nations.
• One of them is that the Security Council could authorise, say, the United States to take military action against another nuclear-armed major power: is that outcome “obviously right”?
• The same logic might be used to justify expelling the United States, Britain and Australia, which were accused of unlawfully invading Iraq in 2003.
• Robertson compares the UN unfavourably with its predecessor, the League of Nations, which “expelled the USSR for attacking Finland”.

Rowan Nicholson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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