GROOME SPENDS SUMMER WORKING WITH UKRAINIAN WAR CRIMES PROSECUTORS
August 2023 — Professor Dermot Groome spent this past summer working with prosecutors in the War Crimes Unit of the Office of the Prosecutor General in Ukraine. He trained 76 prosecutors in the investigation and prosecution of international crimes and advised them on current investigations.
In May of 2022, the Secretary of State Anthony Blinken established the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group (ACA). This group is a joint effort of the US, UK and EU to provide the expertise Ukrainian prosecutors need to meet the challenges of investigating the thousands of atrocities being committed during the Russian invasion. Groome first travelled to Ukraine in May of 2022 as part of this initiative and has been supporting the work of prosecutors remotely ever since. In the fall of 2022, Dean Conway invited several prosecutors to take Groome’s International Criminal Law course remotely.
This summer, Groome began his work by attending a retreat in Warsaw with other ACA members from the UK and EU as well as the Prosecutor General of Ukraine. During the retreat, there were detailed discussions of the Prosecutor General’s needs and how to effectively and efficiently meet those needs in a coordinated manner.
Groome then spent seven weeks in Kyiv, working intensively with prosecutors in the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine. He developed a six-week training program called Investigating and Prosecuting International Crimes to give prosecutors the legal and technical knowledge necessary to investigate the crimes of Aggression, Genocide, Crimes against Humanity, and War Crimes. The training was practice-based and drew upon Groome’s 11 ½ years of experience investigating international crimes as a UN war crimes prosecutor.
Groome also advised Ukrainian prosecutors on some of their cases.
Groome will continue to support ACA’s important work remotely during the upcoming academic year.
Groome during one of the training sessions at
the Office of the Prosecutor General.
A training session continues in the bomb
shelter during an air raid alert.
Groome and two colleagues consult with a local prosecutor
investigating a shelling that killed ten civilians.
English and Ukrainian version of training materials.
Professor Dermot Groome is a Professor of Law and the Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Penn State Dickinson Law. Much of his teaching, scholarship, and service focus on emerging areas of human rights and international criminal law and draw upon his deep expertise and experiences. After starting his career in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office where he was a member of the Sex Crimes Unit and after working in Jamaica, W.I. on issues of community development, human rights, and children’s rights, Professor Groome worked in Cambodia. While in Cambodia, he served as a Legal Advisor to the International Human Rights Law Group, helped lead an investigation into a 1997 attack on peaceful protestors and drafted a report for the UN Security Council, helped the Cambodia Defender’s Project and Legal Aid of Cambodia investigate deaths in police custody, worked on issues related to the incarceration of children, and wrote a draft juvenile criminal procedure code. Professor Groome subsequently spent over 11 years as a senior war crimes prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He investigated and drafted the first genocide indictment against a sitting head of state, Slobodan Milošević, and was the Senior Trial Attorney for the Bosnia indictment. In total, Groome led the prosecution of five international criminal trials including the case against Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of genocide for the murder of over 7,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. He led eight large complex international investigations of senior military, political, and police officials. Groome’s cases all included crimes of sexual violence against women, men, and children. He was instrumental in the development of Joint Criminal Enterprise, a theory of criminal responsibility often used to assess the culpability of senior officials for the crimes committed by their subordinates. Two documentaries have been made about Professor Groome’s cases: The Trial of Ratko Mladić (PBS/Frontline 2019) and Crimes Before the ICTY: Višegrad (UN TV 2017).