Welcome and it's a it's a pleasure to be here with you all and so I I can't see any any faces so if anybody has a question or just raise their hand because I can't quite gauge what's happening with my with my screen sharing and so I just want to give a thank you for the introduction I just wanted to give a little bit of information about some of the work that we do at Global Rights Compliance on Starvation and then from there we'll go into just a brief kind of framework of the of the law and some of the material elements which will sort of lead into how we look at those elements in the investigative work that we're doing in Ukraine and elsewhere so since 2017 GRC and myself have been really leading the starvation in humanitarian crises portfolio and what we've been doing there is working with a range of state and non-state partners partners particularly humanitarian agencies to advance the prevention prohibition and accountability for starvation we developed in 2019 a starvation training manual the first on the market which has subsequently been updated into arabic and ukrainian our principal focuses as you can see on the screen there have been situations of conflict induced hunger with a real forensic focus on Syria south sudan yemen t gray and now ukraine we've also looked at north korea and venezuela for situations outside of conflict settings as well and and here if we just turn to some of the reports that we've produced over the years this was our yemen starvation makers then t gray and south sudan and in due course i'll talk to you a little bit about our partnerships with open source providers because we've worked with pretty much all of the leading providers at this point and how that has transformed some of our investigative work so yemen and t gray were with bell and cat and the south sudan report was with the center for information resilience who we continue to work with now in ukraine along with our other provider imsl so i want to um and this is the starvation training manual with the three frameworks and then also um last year i think uh it was released the starvation mobile app so there's the qr codes for anybody that is interested it's a really useful tool in terms of breaking down the legal framework looking at templates best practice for investigative methods um and also browsing uh yeah browsing the library so i want to start and kind of kick us off with um uh uh uh uh something that our partner does and our friend and famine expert alex door who i'm sure many of you will have heard of this is a um what happens when you google image search the term starvation and this is typically the sort of images that come up or the images that um tend to be conjured when we're engaging with people over the last five years we've really started to see um some more yemen related images appear in this search but i would hesitate to say that still at this point that this is how starvation is represented both in the media and also in our kind of collective understanding and what i'd like to do throughout the course of the next 30 minutes or so is just to discuss how this crime and its consequences look rather different now i want to just show you these um uh three possible starvation scenarios and just have you reflect on those we don't necessarily need to talk about them at this point but we can bring that into the q and a later but i just want you to take a look at those three scenarios and see whether you would view that now and then subsequently at the end of the session um as to a possible starvation related conduct um these all involve um potentially starvation related elements and i'd like to discuss and understand with today's session what we hope will become slightly more obvious to you so in that first scenario you can see medicine and healthcare workers the second scenario relating to heating and then the third in relation to humanitarian aid supplies i'll just pause there for a moment just to make sure everybody can read those and then we can talk about them collectively at the end but really first of all the kind of starting principles really what do we mean when we talk about starvation what is it that um other than those images that are conjured in our minds and so we came up at the early stages of our work in this space i'm sorry for the beeping that's i think it's the lobby i'm not quite sure how to switch that off um what do we mean when we talk about starvation outside of just a purely um the crime itself so the definition that we produced collectively again also with alex de wall is that starvation is the process of deprivation that occurs when actors impede the capacity of targeted persons to access the means of sustaining life and so we'll talk in a moment about who we mean by targeted persons and what impediments that might frame but as you can see there on the slide there's two really important things to clarify and both of these point to the most common misconceptions around starvation and this was a lot of our early work was sort of myth busting a bit similar to some of the work that was done around sexual and gender based violence in the early years is really trying to demystify what it is that the term means and the conduct and the consequences so the first myth or misconception is really that starvation is simply about food and as you'll link back to those earlier scenarios that we talked about it really does encompass much more than hunger or nourishment it is the deprivation of anything that is essential to survival the term object indispensable to survival is found in IHL and in the international criminal law definition and helpfully under IHL you have a broad range of items that are listed there in in the additional protocol and this includes both water installation supplies irrigation medicine clothing shelter fuel and electricity and what we understand in our engagement with various prosecutors is that the means to sustain life and the term OIS is going to be interpreted broadly when it comes to that first prosecution it's also important to raise and we'll come back to this in a few slides time that objects indispensable to survival are going to be situation specific so what is essential to a South Sudanese mother in summer is going to be different to what is indispensable to a Ukrainian elderly male in winter so it's just important to focus on you know that broader concept of what's essential to survival and then the second is really the emphasis under international law is on the perpetrator to starve means to cause suffering whether that psychological or by death or deprivation and the light within the international criminal law framework is very much shone on the wrongdoing so I am starving you as opposed to the consequence you know you are starving and as we'll go into later we'll see that as a material element of the crime a consequence is not relevant so if we turn then to how hunger occurs in conflict now there are infinite ways in which this appears to be happening in modern and more recent conflicts and it can take the way that this contributes to food insecurity can take really a whole range of different modes of perpetration but the most common ones that we have come across and the ones that we found quite helpful to organize in terms of our investigative planning have been to group it into three main causes and these always lead us back to showing that the vast majority of times that this conflict induced food insecurity or starvation can be linked back to human conduct whether that's emissions or commissions so as you can see these three broad buckets there where food sources are damaged and destroyed and this can take place with looting or attacks on food sources or attacks on humanitarian aid and the report that we've just released in relation to the Ukrainian grain seizure you'll see that both in the first bucket and then the third bucket the second is access to food is limited and again the most common way we're seeing particularly in relation to Ukraine is the use of sieges and blockades but then also direct attacks themselves on markets or food producing areas again agricultural or again in the context of Syria where you saw those sustained attacks on bakeries and then the third is where agricultural activities are interrupted and this is very very common in times of conflict where you see a lot of the male population going into active conductive hostilities but it's also where agricultural infrastructure or agriculture itself is attacked and again as I said this is linked to this most recent report we released so if we turn then to how it is criminalized under international criminal law in many ways the crime is very much still in its infancy and for a long time it has been practically favoured and very much legally permissible and indeed the UK and its allies used it extensively in its combat operations in both world wars but the sort of curiosity with this crime and where really my involvement in the work started was why it hasn't been prosecuted on an international level before and why as we were seeing this reemergence of global food insecurity and the use of it in conflict there was this real disconnect with what was happening in the international courts tribunals and the international criminal court itself so the Rome statue was the first time where starvation was formally penalized by an international judicial body even though there were a host of other crimes including genocide or crimes against humanity that would intersect with that starvation conduct and the fact that it only appeared on the international stage with the Rome statue meant that again despite seeing a lot of this conduct in Cambodia or in Yugoslavia there was no standalone prosecution of the war crime of starvation at the international level and that still remains the case as you can see on the next slide war crimes of course as you'll know our violations of international humanitarian law and the criminality of starvation emanates from IHL where there are three specific sets of rules which have gained customary international law status and these have very much informed the interpretation of the elements of the crime and how we go about investigating them in practice and I won't go into too much detail on that given the time so here you'll see the international criminal law and Rome statue definition and this is now following the Swiss amendment and the work that GRC did with Switzerland and other member states this has now been amended the Rome statue for the historic amendment to include this crime under a non-international armed conflict which again was very much where there was a real gap in the legal framework when I first started practicing in this area given that the vast majority of conflicts pre-Ukraine were all in non-international armed conflict there was no international mechanism with which to prosecute that directly so as you can see here are the elements of the crimes and as a barrister in the UK and practicing barrister on the international level for us the elements of crime certainly for me is very much a sort of a cookbook of the ingredients of what make up international crimes and most are a lot of practitioners certainly ID will always have this open on my desktop or open actually physically on my desk and it's really helpful to understand the breakdown of these elements when you're starting to investigate to understand what elements you need to be satisfying and to what standard and so here as you can see as with all crimes across the Rome statue you have the objective elements the the physical acts the mental elements the mens rea what the intentional the motive was behind and then the contextual elements which tend to be usually the most easy to prove and again as we've talked about objects indispensable to survival by design are typically open-ended and there and what we understand from our engagement with the international criminal court and other practitioners in European war crimes prosecuting authorities is that we anticipate with the first prosecutions to be more classically linked to food and water we anticipate it's not going to be something slightly more creative to start with but we expect as we see again with that trajectory with sexual and gender-based violence you start to see how that has developed over the years from you know that very narrow definition of rape and how that has expanded really domestically and internationally in the right direction so what do we mean by deprivation this again is one of the material elements the deprivation can take a number of different forms these are the most common as you can see on the slide that we tend to look at in our in our work and depriving people of resources destroying and stealing and blocking humanitarian aid attacking water facilities attacking agricultural production and it's also as we mentioned before important to point that this can be both a commission and a no mission so preventing humanitarian aid coming in is is also very common again very much being seen in relation to to Gaza deprivation will often take the form of multiple acts so it's really important particularly when we're investigating to look at any particular patterns that we can draw from the broader context of of the conduct of hostilities so an attack on food sources or an attack on humanitarian aid may be only one single part of a broader network of criminality which is why it's also important to be aware of non-food related deprivations and yeah and so again as we mentioned before there is no material element that the crime itself is a specific intent crime and so this is where it's very important to establish the the mental elements which are the preeminent over the physical acts so there is no requirement to demonstrate that people actually starved or died as a result of starvation so they're a victim or a survivor's resourcefulness or resilience will will not impact a perpetrator's responsibility notwithstanding that it's not a material element it will still be important for a number of reasons particularly for gravity and threshold and in assessing how serious the crime is and whether it would be given priority for prosecution it's also going to be very important in terms of its indicative of the mental elements of the crime and then following any successful prosecution it would be important in relation to sentencing again the the next mental element is that it must be aimed at civilians and so when we talked about that definition that we came up with at the beginning about targeted persons in conflict that is very much linked to civilians and again I I I don't think I need to go into the definition of civilians at this point the next is is the sort of real challenge in terms of dual use objects and we'll get into this a little bit as we go through some of the investigative work we've been doing in Ukraine but dual use objects as you'll know are those that may be used in direct support of military action but also may be used by civilians so for example a military vehicle may be transporting civilians at various points this they may then change the use of that and make it a legitimate military target in urban warfare of the types that we see that we saw in Syria certainly in the Balkans and now very much in Ukraine evaluating the lawfulness of an attack on a dual use object is incredibly complex the assessment of course will always be done on a case by case basis but some of the key questions that we are always asking when we're presented with a case that we need to review for the prosecutor general's office or in a line of inquiry that we're looking at is whether there was any legitimate military targets in the area at the time and whether those civilian objects had changed use by virtue of it being used by the military so moving then to you know the practice and how we're doing this inside Ukraine at the moment we knew very early on we've been headquartered in Ukraine since 2014 and we were fairly confident giving the players and giving the context and some of the early intelligence reporting that we were getting that this conflict would be ripe for this type of method of warfare and so we put together a proposal to monitor and investigate these and support the Ukrainian authorities to be able to do this both domestically and internationally we are 10 months in with another eight months to go of investigation time before we move to a legal drafting stage so a bit like a final trial brief way we would go into the kind of drafting phase there's three principal pillars of the starvation mobile justice team the first of course is is maripole which is what we're heavily involved in at the moment the second is the naval blockade of the Black Sea ports and the grain theft which we've just released the report on and closing that pillar down and then the final is this broader patterns of attacks on objects indispensable to survival and we really are seeing very clear patterns across the whole of Ukraine and so this particular this last pillar has been where we've looked very extensively at the Kukovka Dam and we're able to produce some really good and fast results on on that with our open source providers and then also this is where we've been looking at various other attacks on water infrastructure and agriculture and the like given the time and I'm just going to discuss two cases which are quite similar in scope so both in seed context and also looking at attacks on the IS but before I move to those two I just want to frame how we go about looking at these investigative inquiries and so when we're looking at these pillars that when we talk about case selection and prioritization you can see this pyramid now prosecutorial authorities or police and investigators will refer to the process of identifying investigating and organizing analyzing the elements of the relevant crimes as case building at the bottom there which is where you get the most information is your crime base and this really just refers to the specific acts or the physical acts of what happened which form the basis of the alleged crime detailing these involves a consideration in relation to starvation of both causes and then the impact itself so looking about you know the real basic questions what happened where it happened and when as we move up the pyramid the information tends to shrink and becomes much more difficult to access or analyze and the linkage section is referring to that link between the crime base and the perpetrator in relation to the violation in question so to establish that linkage a prosecutor will need to identify both the perpetrator and explain in what way he or she may be responsible which is also known as your mode of liability this critical tip of the triangle is really which will transform cases from an ordinary crime to a war crime or a crime against humanity or indeed genocide as well and just anecdotally this is a sort of challenge that we face with a lot of prosecutors that we work with outside of Ukraine but also in Ukraine so we work with very very experienced senior prosecutors state security who have been trained for decades to view these types of incidents in isolation so when we're with a mobile justice team visiting a crime scene whether that's a newly liberated area or indeed visiting a supermarket that's had a missile strike their initial instinct is to view and preserve and collect information through the lens of say for example in the supermarket scenario 35 individual murders rather than a broader war crime and as a crime against humanity which actually isn't part of the Ukrainian criminal code at this point in any event so it's sort of pivoting away from how you investigate and establish this on a wider level so the first investigative piece I want to talk to you about was the first actual piece of work that we did on the starvation mobile justice team which was an investigation into an incident in Chernihiv and the reason that we selected Chernihiv was that it encompasses a really similar to Maripole spectrum of attacks but because of the the scale and the significance of Maripole it really didn't get a lot of international attention but there was a lot of parallels and a lot of patterns and we also really wanted at the outset to test our methodology and how we work with our open source providers and how we would engage with the prosecuting authorities so actually on the same day as the drama theatre attack in Maripole on the 16th of March there was an attack on a bread queue in Chernihiv where there was a shelling which killed 21 civilians and injured dozens in the nearby area and including nearby buildings because of the nature of the this being a distribution point for food it had some of the kind of hallmarks of a starvation indicator that we wanted to dig a little bit deeper into before during and after that particular attack there was a a large degree of attacks on the heating infrastructure on civilian dwellings on markets hospitals and other food and water distribution points in Chernihiv which again kind of indicated that this was more than an isolated incident and maybe part of this method of warfare that we wanted to ascertain the challenge that we've faced with Chernihiv was that there was really inconsistent media reporting with lots of different death totals being cited lots of different weapons being cited at one point it looked like this was a troops on the ground with firing guns rather than this being a shelling incident the attack occurred after the attempted encirclement of Chernihiv which was part of this wider key offensive specifically trying to besiege Kiev from from the west so the the background there as you can see there was an artillery strike in a predominantly and very densely residential area 21 were killed and and from our initial assessment there was no obvious military target so we wanted to try and identify whether there was any legitimate military targets in the area and whether this was a violation of international humanitarian law or indeed a war crime so we engaged with the prosecutor's office there was an initial report by another organization called truthhounds which we assessed and there was some gaps there that we needed to fill and then we visited the the site itself in may of this year so what was complicated again from some of the media reporting and some of the misinformation disinformation that we were tackling and also with some of the gaps around the truthhounds report was the the presence of Ukrainian military in the area at the time and whether that would transform this from a potentially unlawful to a lawful incident and we had information that there was potential territorial Ukrainian territorial army in the area and also military presence in a nearby school which would have been within range of this particular incident so the main question for us was what was the intended target and what we were able to find is a wide degree of information which we shared with various prosecuting authorities and again with with all credit to a lot of the really impressive work of our open source providers so we were able to find the 35th guards motorized rifle brigade who were in the area at the time this is a Russian unit they were likely to have fire batteries including a multiple launch rocket system and grads which were both of those weapons were were in use and there was a digital profile that we were also able to ascertain from from mobile device data of a 120th guards artillery brigade that was also within range and this particular unit was known for using the both grads and the mlrs our assessment was that it was more than likely that a grad rocket system was used and with the satellite imagery showing a line of Russian artillery assets so how it says within effective range of the impact site as you can see there in the yellow this was a densely populated urban area and civilian loss of life and damage to civilian objects would of course been anticipated when using this type of weapon and these are known as non-precision artilleries and it really our military assessment and legal assessment was that this would have been an excessive choice of weapon use in the context with which they were operating we also were able to identify that there were drones in the operation at the time of this attack and on six on particularly on the 16th of March which would have given sufficient imagery quality imagery to the Russian forces fire controllers of the targets and of civilians being fired upon and it was clear from the satellite imagery when you saw that the size of the bread queue from satellite imagery and that it was very clearly a civilian gathering there was no nobody was in uniform there was no sort of military formation it was very much looked like a civilian queue which was highly visible and then finally we were able to identify through a number of different capabilities that there were in fact no military presence near the bread queue itself but further investigations were recommended in terms of the Ukrainian territorial defence forces and where they were and the use of their presence in the school our final conclusion on the Chernihiv report was that the manor timing and the pattern of attacks around there was that there was a strong case of war crimes against directing attacks against civilian objects or civilians themselves and there was also prima facie evidence of pattern analysis of the potential use of starvation as a method of warfare as well we also looked at the war crime of terror and which is is sort of continues to be kept in the periphery so moving then just finding the last few slides on Mariupol and I just want to give a brief overview on on our focus on Mariupol and and why so many other investigators and open source providers have decided that it is it's incredibly challenging each to document and to pull out analysis from and so from the outset we really wanted to try and focus on a very narrow element of the Mariupol context in order not to get lost given the resources that we have so we at the outset had tried to focus on humanitarian access impediments and attacks on humanitarian personnel within the siege itself and this has broadened out a little bit and I'll explain why so here's our sort of five-point theory and I'll just run through it in in very brief detail in the context of of sieges and particularly some of the sieges we've worked on in Syria and then also in Yemen with Tayyas Mariupol was a very short siege and approximately 13 weeks in total and within that there were significant periods of people exiting so it really was a poor siege at at various points and this has been really important for us in understanding the intent behind certain attacks and patterns of conduct given that people were able to leave so in the the first week in the first five days there were between 100 and 130 thousand individuals that left Mariupol and then we enter into a real classic siege period where there was about 14 days when nobody was was in or out and then the next 17 days we had about give or take 60 000 individuals that left and then again in the beginning of April about 30 000 individuals left to Zaporizhia these population flows complicated the usual assessment of how we would look at a siege which then led us to some information and I kind of case theory around filtration particularly as we started to see some of that emerging elsewhere around the rest of Ukraine. Now of course as you'll know a siege is not unlawful under international humanitarian law but to abide by it and abide by the rules of it including access to food and humanitarian aid and ensuring that that access is unimpeded in the evacuations it is notoriously difficult to to conduct a lawful siege. What we do know is that from the 24th of February there was absolutely no access to international organizations to deliver aid to Mariupol and this pattern was replicated across other occupied territories as well. We also saw very little if any attempts to make by the Russian forces to alleviate the civilian suffering during this during the siege and there was of course as you'll know and see a sustained bombardment campaign against civilians to the near obliteration of the city. Given the time I'm just going to talk very briefly about that first pillar of the theory so what sort of attacks we were looking at on a critical infrastructure and on objects indispensable to survival and how we have tried to understand this scale and severity of those particular attacks. So actually we'll come back to that one in a moment. Almost immediately following the full-scale invasion we started to see reports emerging of attacks on this critical infrastructure. Our particular investigation is focused on energy, heat and electricity. This was really critical during the early freezing temperatures of the end of March and end of February and March and the impact that these had both on communication but also on access to healthcare and hospitals and so it wasn't simply just a heating issue but also how that had a knock-on effect on what was able to be provided in terms of energy in hospitals. We also looked at water given that there were sustained water shortages and an inability to repair the damage that was being caused due to the continual shelling and attacks and we've really seen again these attacks on water across various points of Ukraine again looking at Kokovka and then Micoliv with a water pipeline attack there. The next was medical care and the significant impact that medicine shortages had causing numerous deaths and severe illnesses. Whilst food and water and we saw these reports being scavenged you know radiators being bled to drink the water out of these buildings the lack of medicine was not replaceable so it was very difficult when you when you didn't have that access and then food producing infrastructure and the attacks there. This distribution point as we said carried across from Chernihiv to Maripole and that was why we were looking at particularly the drama theatre and that being used as a distribution point both for evacuations but also for humanitarian relief and shelter and food and water and basic necessities. Through a primary dataset we were able to verify and geolocate 557 incidents 435 of those related to critical infrastructure damage and we were able to geolocate and verify 77 entries of the possible presence and firing positions of Russian forces. We then have taken and we're still in the process of understanding and unraveling this data but data from the conflict observatory using artificial intelligence learning tools to identify and damage map and the buildings in Maripole and place that on a on a time slider so that we're able to understand whether there is a correlation between evacuations and then the attacks on critical infrastructure and on the attacks on humanitarian evacuation corridors. Our approach with critical infrastructure and again as we talked about before with with damage mapping and dual use objects is to use a two prong test and that is to identify whether a particular piece of infrastructure may have qualified as a military objective and that will be looking at its nature location and purpose and whether it made an effective contribution to the military action and then the second prong whether it's total or partial destruction capture or neutralization would offer a definitive military advantage and so we then would move from there into the the rest of the IHL principles whether there was any precaution uh precautionary measures taken and whether the attack itself and the weapons used was proportionate but I think what we are very clearly seeing in the Maripole report will be released in February we believe or potentially at the end of February to go inside with the anniversary and then there'll be a forward-facing report and then the the broader legal analysis will form part of the article 15 communication. So this is the final image that I would um maybe it's not out it's coming up perfect um I don't know how or there we go so I think just to end in conclusion I think what's really important and has been a tragic outcome of the conflict in in Ukraine has been the way that starvation and starvation and conflict is starting to be viewed and I think Ukraine has changed so much globally and the war on Russia's weaponization of food has profoundly impacted global food insecurity but I think it's also started to have a change in terms of perception and it's has the ability to change the face of starvation and what we hope and believe should be precipitating the first prosecution of starvation as a method of warfare um on the international stage so we hope that this is in years to come what we understand starvation to look like rather than um those images that we saw at the beginning of a sort of potbellied children so I'll pause there and I will um look at the Q&A if there is any questions um please feel free to ask Katriona thank you very much for this fantastic presentation it was a wonderful presentation not only because you provided all the doctrinal developments about the war crime of starvation of civilians but also you talk about real work your investigative work with real examples and cases from the conflict in Ukraine and you highlighted also the issue of the open resource evidence and providers which is very very important it's a it's a big big issue you can discuss some other time together you know with the global food insecurity and I encourage all of you all the participants I wrote of the Q&A you know you can post your questions at the Q&A or actually now you can raise your hand you can use your microphone and ask a question I can see a hand sorry with teams I'm not the the best one so if this hand would like to take the floor please do it thank you Katriona it's you you can take the floor I can see now Katriona can you hear us yes I can hear you can you hear me yes we have you okay perfect sorry my connection is bad and thank you appreciate attending this session I wanted to ask so in terms of the legal frameworks surrounding starvation you said that in order to verify an act of starvation the number of deaths or humanitarian cases are not a statistics that is used to verify such cases so my question is what are the main factors that you believe are important to verify such international cases and don't you believe that with factors not like being not quantitative there might be the issue of you know what is what we see has happened for example with the genocide convention so you know this problem of actually verifying and holding states accountable and not allowing them to actually escape legal legal legal account thanks Karolina yeah thank you I think there is there is one more question another would you like me to collect some questions is that okay or do you want to respond to each of them maybe you want to respond to each of them yeah yeah I'll maybe I'll try respond to Karolina and then and then I can I think it's Ulyana who's next um thank you Karolina for that question I think it's a really really good one and really important to just to clarify because it is a bit of um uh sometimes it's sort of a bit yeah maybe I wasn't particularly clear so the material elements of the crime do not require that starvation is proved as a result so there's no as a prosecutor um there is no legal requirement to establish one or a multitude of deaths that said most prosecutors who are looking at a crime base particularly on the international level would be very uninterested in a crime that has no impact it wouldn't it's unlikely to meet a gravity threshold test that would be required um for for a preliminary examination to be open for example so whilst it's not a material element it is really important in terms of establishing what happened and as I said also establishing what was intended to happen from the perspective of the perpetrator but I think that the parallel that you make with genocide and the sort of quantitative challenges there is a really good one and and for many reasons that's why we've tried to stay away from comparisons with genocide um despite there being a very clear framework where the the two there's a nexus and also of course because both are specific intent crimes Ukraine has sort of forced us to relook at that particularly given some of the indicators potentially of of genocidal acts within Ukraine and of course the prosecutor's interest in in pursuing that so I think that the problem with with verifying um is is a real it's the real challenge but the factors that we need to look at and the primary factors as you remember that pyramid is the crime base itself so looking at the acts of deprivation and then once you've established that there are this you know a pattern of deprivation that you're seeing whether that is preventing humanitarian workers from accessing a besieged area or whether it is you know bombarding um you know food producing areas um or for example in tea grave where we saw you know scorched earth policies where um agriculture was just kind of burnt to the ground once you move past that crime base it's really trying to understand what the intention was behind this and that is something that we tend to verify and establish through circumstantial evidence so whether there is patterns of behavior whether there are factors to demonstrate that there is um the other kind of conduct of hostilities is not abiding by international humanitarian law and from there whether we can piece together both that intention to deprive but then also the more trickier mens rea um the intention to actually starve a civilian population so i think it's um it's certainly not without its challenges and and one of the primary challenges really is because we've never had this prosecuted before we don't have the kind of red lines that you have in other cases so i've worked for a long time at the ukoslavia tribunal and there's you know lots of precedent there on targeting and and on various different crimes but with this crime where we're still a little bit in the dark so i i hope that's helpful um thank you thank you katriona can i suggest something thank you very much katriona yes can i suggest something can i read the the the questions we have at the q&a and then finally i will give the flow to yana you know for who has raised her hand so there are two connections from nana one it's about the nagorno-karabakh conflict as we speak now um and her question is how would you assess the recent uh according to nana i think cleansing of all in the area in nagorno-karabakh precipitated by a month's long blockade it regards legal parameters around starvation uh there is also a question about your assessment from ed regarding your um have your or your team drawn in comparisons between your previous work and what is currently happening in gaza so there are two cases regarding there are two questions regarding cases i would say uh and then nana also asks that i will give the flow to yana i'm not going to be unfair asks about the open source um investigation you know the open source um at what extent would you say that the open source evidence uh documentation or archiving archiving can affect persecuting moving forward you know uh in the question who curates and manages the archives you rely on currently and uh if you would like to to address this question so then i'm going we can finish up you know with yana's final question is that okay yeah perfect sure so um on the on the the first question from nana on our media so we we haven't done a huge amount of work on this at all we've been very much focused on um ukraine and other um uh situations as well but i think what we're seeing and and some of the peripheral reading that we've done as a team and and we are hoping to get into that um situation with some more in some more detail in due course but what we are seeing is of course when you have a situation and again parallels to to gaza where humanitarian access and civilians are being entirely besieged um and cut off from um food sources cut off from humanitarian access prevented from being able to leave these are all the hallmarks of ihl violations which would then move potentially along that spectrum to whether that's war crimes or crimes against humanity um and i think there is you know of course there's a there's a long history inside armenia with with um famine and starvation and so it is um yeah i think it's it's something that we would very much like to look into more and then certainly ed in relation to gaza i think the comparisons are you know they're they're um irresistible to make really i think the the pattern of attacks that we're seeing you know both from from syria to gaza to um to ukraine is is a very familiar playbook with the the the way in which weapons are being used the way that civilians are being used the way that hospitals and safe places or designated safe places and the dual use aspect that we talked about um it is something that um it's incredibly incredibly challenging but i think there are very very um vivid comparisons to be drawn in in the in the method of warfare that's being used and in the impact of of civilians um and then finally in terms of the question relation to open source i think um thanks nano for that that's also a really good one so we have a number it's a bit of a patchwork we have our own relational database that we've created um within the starvation mobile justice team where we preserve and archive store log um and preserve that information through um a number of different verify processes we also have access and archive into the mnemonic database and have access to a kind of a wider database with other providers that are using that and then we have our own sort of internal non-date non-database relational archiving as well and that's also in addition to some of the processes that our providers use so um i think that you know how open source documentation is going to be used in any future prosecution is very much a live question and one that we're discussing with various experts in relation to admissibility um within the ukrainian context there's still a bit of a perception that open source is best for lead generating rather than being a kind of independent source itself whereas on the international level we've we've moved on a little bit from that so i think there's still a lot to be um understood and how this is being used is still in its really also in its infancy um but certainly from from our perspective it has transformed the way that we've investigated from you know 2019 with with bell and cat and yemen it really has changed the course of our work for for the better and then maybe yeah thank you very oh yeah hi uh thank you so much for this presentation and for providing us with a legal overview uh that was very very insightful my question is whether um at any point in this investigation or in the legal um aspects will you be looking in the psychological impact of using this crime because uh as you probably in many of you know um death from hunger uh in the 20th century affected millions of ukrainians and this genocide is called holodomor and it is being recognized more since 2022 because of the parallels and i'm wondering like yeah could you tell us a bit more about that thank you very much reanna thanks liana i think it's a great a really great and very important question and i think it it really leads me back to this this point of of of why the crime itself is so important in terms of fair labeling and why when you have other available crimes that might be easier to prosecute that we still try and encourage prosecutors and investigators to look at starvation itself because it's because of that labeling point that it has a very um specific impact on communities and on individuals themselves which is you know an intergenerational impact and as you as you rightly recognize the framework of countries that have experienced famine forced famine and deliberate famine in its recent history is one that provides um yeah a significant impact psychologically and socially and and culturally and so that is why we're really encouraging um a range of different prosecutors to be able to capture the the the extent of this violation and i think what we see across you know not just inside ukraine but but in other contexts as well is that there's so much again the parallels there's so many parallels of sexual and gender-based violence is that you have this shame where you have the indignity of of starvation and what that entails in terms of choosing which child to feed and which child to not feed which child is able to get to the hospital and which you can't which neighbor you're going to steal from and which neighbor you're not going to share your food with it's all of these small insidious acts that that internalize there's a lot of shame that is internalized with that conduct and a lack of recognition that this is something that is being done to them rather than something that is you know a personal failing so i think how it's affected our work in ukraine is on a number of different levels because you have this very recent history but i think what's interesting and as you know as a practical example of liana is that because obviously the word holodomia really does link to food um i think our engagement with prosecutors and investigators inside of ukraine when we talked to them about starvation they immediately think to that scenario where you had you know mass starvation significant deaths and death toll and here of course in the current conflict we're not seeing those types of of deaths from starvation we're seeing them from attacks on critical infrastructure and the like so it's it's it's both helpful in framing but also it causes its own challenges because the impact is very different this time around um but i think it does galvanize that community and has created a real sense of fear within the ukrainian community that this is this is being done to them again and so with the same you know parties to the conflict so um i think it's it's it's a critical um feature to our to our work and a really important question so thank you for raising it thank you so much thank you very much for katriona for addressing all these questions and uh i want to thank all the participants you know speaking about the importance of this crime not to be only acknowledged but at some states to be brought uh before uh made me think of the expressivist value as we say of of international criminal law something we have seen with other crimes how important was to convey particular uh messages and uh also the fact that until very recently it was not even included as as a crime in a non-international conflict in the rom's gadget that speaks volumes uh but it looks that uh the situation changes uh when it comes to legal uh developments unfortunately due to reality reality forces us and um uh unless you would like to to add something uh i would like to thank you on behalf of the work crimes research group for this wonderful discussion i'm pretty sure we will have the opportunity to discuss again to have you again in person this time uh in london and to talk about other developments but also other aspects of of your work which is a very important part of work i would like also to thank least very much for accommodating this webinar uh so katriona you have the final word once more thank you very much for mass thank you thank you very much for for inviting me it's been a pleasure to to talk and um yeah really impressed by by the questions and i'm very happy feel free to reach out at any point if there's any follow-up or any um further inquiries and my door is yeah very much open so thank you we are very grateful about that and we really hope we are going to host you in person soon in london to discuss event further thank you all for your questions and participation once more uh have a nice uh day and we're looking forward to seeing you to our next uh seminar thank you all have a good day thank you bye bye thank you very much thank you thank you


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