National Pro Bono Week: Quinn and Covington Lawyers Take on Russia

Jonathan Gimblett’s commentary was included in an article from The Lawyer covering Covington’s representation of Ukraine at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

Jonathan said “there was lots of speculation before the 2022 invasion began, so we were carefully watching whether there were legal implications within our existing ICJ lawsuit. So we had the benefit of kicking around some ideas in advance, but the speech that Putin made on the morning of the 24th was transformative of how we were thinking about the legal issues.”

He added, “There was this very stark statement that the purpose of the so-called special military operation was to prevent a genocide that was ongoing in Donbas, and for which, in Putin’s view, the Ukrainian government bore responsibility. We thought that statement could be the hook for an entirely new theory based on an abuse of the genocide convention.”

Jonathan also commented on the experience of trying the case with the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, saying, “You emotionally get engaged in a way that you rarely do with other cases. We’ve had this relationship with our clients and a wider body of Ukrainian colleagues going back seven years, so you really do feel the urgency and the importance of the work you’re doing when you’re on the phone with one of your colleagues who’s hiding in a bathroom from missiles that have been fired into Kyiv. When you’re in court, it goes somewhat beyond the usual situation when you have a set of lawyers that are representing the very entity that is causing all this havoc and death in Ukraine and putting at risk the people that you’ve worked with and developed friendships with.”