The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, affirmed that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, will not be arrested in Brazil if he decides to attend the G20 leaders’ summit that the South American country will host next year as president of the group.
“I think Putin can easily go to Brazil. (…) What I can say is that if I am president of Brazil and he comes to Brazil, there is no way he would be arrested,” Lula said last night, during an interview with the Indian media Firstpost.
Furthermore, he insisted that the G20 is not a forum to discuss war, and recalled that Russia will organize the BRICS summit next year, which he said he himself will attend, so he would expect a reciprocal visit from the Russian leader. .
Brazil will pick up the baton of the G20 Presidency from India on December 1, a country that this year hosted more than a hundred meetings between the delegates of the member countries, including the leaders’ summit in New Delhi that is taking place this weekend.
Last March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against the Russian president for alleged war crimes in Ukraine, after which Putin has been absent from several high-level meetings, such as the BRICS summit (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) recently organized in the African country, or the meeting of G20 leaders in New Delhi. In both cases he sent the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, to represent the interests of the Kremlin.
Up to 123 countries, including Brazil, have signed the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the ICC, and another thirty have signed it, but have not ratified it. This was the first time in history that the ICC issued an arrest warrant against the president of a member country of the UN Security Council.
Lula’s statements come within the framework of the G20 leaders’ summit that concludes today in India satisfactorily, after the countries reached a joint agreement yesterday. Had consensus not been reached, the New Delhi summit would have been the first without a joint agreement since the first US-hosted leaders’ meeting in 2008.
