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Willy Fautré and Patricia Duval are European human rights advocates
known for defending religious communities from persecution and
interference by state authorities, often defending traditional
believers from rigidly secular government policies.
But now they are accusing Patriarch Kirill, the spiritual leader of
the Russian Orthodox Church, of inciting aggression and crimes
against humanity by his outspoken support for Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine and urging his indictment by the International Criminal
Court (ICC). (Disclosure: I have cooperated closely with both.)
Citing the Court’s legal mandate, Fautré and Duval posted on the
website of Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF), the Brussels-based
organization Fautré co-founded and has led since 1989, an appeal to
ICC Prosecutor Karim A. A. Khan. The appeal calls for actions “to
hold personally accountable and prosecute Vladimir Mikailovitch
Goundiaiev, known as Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, for
inspiring, inciting, justifying, aiding and abetting war crimes
(Art. 8 of the Rome Statute) and crimes against humanity (Art. 7)
perpetrated and being perpetrated by the Russian armed forces in
Ukraine.”
In support of their charges, Fautré and Duval cite a sermon Kirill
delivered at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior on Feb. 27,
three days after the invasion began. As documented by the Russian
state Interfax service, Kirill prayed for the Lord to preserve the
Russian land… “a land which now includes Russia and Ukraine and
Belarus and other tribes and peoples.” As noted in a European
Parliament Resolution, Kirill provided “theological cover” for
Russia’s war aimed at absorbing the country within a greater Russia
or neutralizing it as an independent democratic state.
The human rights defenders say that “the Patriarch castigated those
who fight against the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine,
targeting them as the ‘evil forces’.” Kirill has portrayed the
military actions as a war against evil, saying in his sermon on
March 6 that “we have entered into a struggle that has not a
physical but a metaphysical significance,” a fight for “human
salvation.” “All in all,” they noted, “Patriarch Kirill has backed
[Russian President] Putin’s purifying ‘operation’ in Ukraine by
equating it to a spiritual purification of Ukraine, a religious
cleansing operation and religious crusade.”
Kirill’s rejection of tolerance for homosexuality seems to be at the
heart of his support for bringing Ukraine back into Holy Russia. His
sermons since the beginning of the war portray the Donbas, whose
Russian-speaking citizens Putin has vowed to “liberate” from
allegedly genocidal attacks by the Ukrainian government, as being
subjected to pro-gay rights propaganda and policies they reject on
religious grounds. In the same sermon, Kirill said that Russia would
remain faithful to God’s law and continued, “we will never put up
with those who destroy this law, including blurring the line between
holiness and sin, and ever more so with those who propagandize sin.”
As reported in Newsweek earlier, Russia’s war against Ukraine can be
characterized as a war to save people remaining faithful to the
beliefs of the Russian Orthodox Church from pernicious pro-gay
rights parades and ideology promoted by Western governments. This
has been a longstanding preoccupation on the part of Russia’s
Eurasianist political influencers like philosopher Alexander Dugin.
Throughout history, holy wars have been among the bloodiest, as they
dehumanize enemies and legitimize extreme violence and cruelty.
Patriarch Kirill has powerfully contributed to Russian state media
propaganda and public discourse in which Ukrainian civilians are
depicted as corrupt “accomplices to the Nazi regime” deserving of
being deported or summarily executed — crimes against humanity that
have now been widely documented.
Fautré and Duval argue that Patriarch Kirill laid the spiritual
foundation to justify the aggression against Ukraine and blessed
everyone carrying out this holy mission, including the war crimes
and the crimes against humanity that are part of it.
Fautré and Duval cite ICC jurisprudence from the Bemba et al. case
in 2016 suggesting that Patriarch Kirill may indeed be abetting the
Russian military’s war crimes in Ukraine. The Court defined
“abetting” as “the moral or psychological assistance of the
accessory to the principal perpetrator, taking the form of
encouragement of or even sympathy for the commission of the
particular offence. The encouragement or support shown need not be
explicit.”
Russia is not a party to the ICC, which therefore has no
jurisdiction in the country, and an indictment of Kirill for
abetting war crimes is thus highly unlikely. Hundreds of Russian
Orthodox priests have signed a petition objecting to the war. But
these factors do not make any less significant, and disturbing, the
spectacle of the religious leader of 95 million Russians, and many
more worldwide, violating the legal norms of a global institution
set up to punish, and deter war criminals. |
