Trump’s ICC Sanctions Block Efforts to Help Ukraine’s Missing Children
The reduction of US aid and the Trump administration's sanctions policy towards the International Criminal Court (ICC) make it difficult for organizations to find Ukrainian children abducted by Russian forces during the war.
The Gaze writes on this referring to Politico.
Thordis Kolbrun Reykfjord Gylfadóttir, the Council of Europe's envoy on supervision of the return of abducted Ukrainian children, said that the end of US financial support for child tracking programs makes it more difficult to release them.
Reykfjord Gylfadóttir noted that this is currently being observed, as unstable funding creates additional uncertainty in the work of these organizations.
According to Politico, some organizations were able to continue their work. The Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health had planned to lay off its Ukrainian staff on July 1, but urgent private donations extended its operations until October. It is unknown whether support will continue.
As stated by Gylfadóttir, Europe now has to find other ways to compensate for the lost funding from the US: “European countries will have to fund it. We cannot stop tracking them and then just re-track them in the months ahead. So that has to continue.”
She did not specify whether the Europeans plan to finance these programs, but noted that she is looking for ways to raise funds.
Furthermore, the US sanctions against the International Criminal Court complicate the prosecution of Russia for child abductions. The Trump administration imposed them in February in response to an investigation into possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza. The restrictions also affected American organizations that support the ICC, and the US government's cooperation with the investigation of Russia's actions ceased.
“People are afraid to work with fundamental independent courts to uphold the rules-based order and international law because they’re afraid of consequences with the U.S. administration,” Gylfadóttir said.
As The Gaze previously reported, new findings from Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab indicate that up to 35,000 Ukrainian children are still missing and are believed to be held in Russia or Russian-occupied territories.