The lecture titled ‘The Weaponisation of Food in Ukraine’ took place at King’s College.
This lecture discussed the prohibition of the use of deliberate starvation, why it has not been prosecuted before, and how the Starvation Mobile Justice Team have been investigating its use in Ukraine and previously in Yemen, Syria, South Sudan and Tigray, Ethiopia.
Speaker:
Catriona Murdoch, partner at Global Rights Compliance. With over 15 years’ experience in international law, she is an ICL expert, recognised as a world-leading expert in the war crime of starvation, associated starvation violations and right to food abuses.
Discussant:
Dr Maria Varaki, Lecturer in International Law, Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She is a member of the ILA’s Committee on Human Rights in times of emergency, and has previously worked for the OHCHR in Geneva, the UNHCR in New York and the Legal Advisory section of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
Since Russia’s illegal invasion in 2022, international legal foundation Global Rights Compliance has been supporting Ukraine’s Office of Prosecutor General (OPG) to investigate the growing number of war crimes, including attacks on civilian infrastructure, sexual violence, murder and child abductions. Their Starvation Mobile Justice Team is made up of a combination of expert lawyers, OSINT researchers, and military experts, and has been focussing on starvation-oriented war crimes. The team has assisted several well-known investigations in the course of the war, including the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam, starvation tactics used against the inhabitants of Chernihiv, and the siege of Mariupol.
The Starvation Mobile Justice Team is part of the UK, EU and US-sponsored Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group (ACA) which was launched in response to the need of the OPG to increase capacity to investigate and prosecute atrocity crimes perpetrated since the invasion by Russian Forces of Ukraine.