This month the Centre for International and Public Law (CIPL) is delighted to announce the publication of a major new report that we hope will shape policy thinking in Australia and globally. The report is entitled War Funders and Profiteers: Economic Complicity in International Crimes in Ukraine and Beyond and, as the title suggests, it takes on the crucial but under-explored issue of international criminal responsibility of those who fund international crimes – war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression – or profit from them.
This CIPL-published report is the product of a year-long collaboration between three CIPL experts (Dr Anton Moiseienko, Emily Bell and Professor Matthew Neuhaus) and Dr Dmytro Koval, Associate Professor of Law at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine and Co-Executive Director of Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian war crimes investigation and documentation centre. The report draws on the ongoing experience of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to map out various forms of economic complicity in international crimes and interrogate their implications under international criminal law.
The findings are stark. Since the prosecution of leading Nazi industrialists at Nuremberg, prosecutions of war funders and profiteers have been few and far between. Furthermore, international criminal law as relates to economic complicity lacks in clarity and coherence. For instance, while all domestic legal systems criminalise dealing with proceeds of crime, international criminal law is silent on handling proceeds of international crimes.
Still, there are opportunities, too. The report proposes 10 concrete recommendations to reinvigorate international and domestic responses to war funding and profiteering, spanning the domains of international criminal law, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing, and sanctions. We at CIPL hope that these recommendations will be read widely and spark a long-overdue discussion.