By June Bell
innovation
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Photograph courtesy of Mia Bonardi
winter 2023
If Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military leaders are ever punished for their unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, international prosecutors already have an indictment for war crimes and a template for how they can be tried.
That’s thanks in part to Mia Bonardi, JD ’22, who helped assemble evidence for the Global Accountability Network (GAN), an international watchdog group of professionals, lawyers, and students who document atrocities and recommend how to prosecute those who commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Bonardi and a team of dedicated volunteers, many of them law students, worked feverishly last spring to produce a massive white paper on the situation in Ukraine. Professor David M. Crane of Syracuse Law School, founding Chief Prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, supervised the effort. In less than a month, the team compiled work that might typically take a year.
Bonardi directs GAN’s Ukraine Task Force and served as a lead writer, editor, and the Russian political research lead for the report. She says she felt compelled to contribute because documenting violations of international law is essential to holding perpetrators accountable. “If the international rule of law cannot be upheld in one place, then it can fail anywhere,” she says. “And where it’s failing, how can it be strengthened to prevent mass atrocity?”
Ukraine Task Force contributors communicated via Signal, an encrypted text messaging service, to avert any interception of their dialogue. As they attempted to assemble biographies of Russian political leaders, the websites they were consulting became inaccessible, forcing them to track down material from other sources. The information would be available one moment, Bonardi says, and then the entire Russian government website would be down the next.
Bonardi and other members of the task force presented the white paper at a June meeting that included members of the Ukrainian Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, and GAN. Together, the groups are advancing a Special Tribunal for Ukraine on the Crime of Aggression.
Assisting her with the report were several Suffolk Law alumni and students to whom she reached out for help, including Jodi Green, JD ’21; Katherine Marsh, Class of 2023; Kajol Raju Class of 2023; Theresea Barrett, Class of 2024; Sage Grant, Class of 2024; and Alexandra Lane, Class of 2024; along with several dozen other contributors from law schools across the country.
Bonardi’s mentor, Suffolk Law Professor Sara Dillon, inspired her interest in international human rights work with a rule of law focus. As a student in Dillon’s international law course, Bonardi wrote a paper about the Chinese government’s persecution of the Uyghurs. That article eventually led to Bonardi’s invitation to work with GAN on war crimes matters.
