The crusade unleashed by the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ) to arrest Russian reporters is outrageous and oversteps all boundaries, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.
On Thursday, the organization, founded by Hollywood actor and filmmaker George Clooney and his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, said it wants to prosecute those it considers “Russian propagandists,” particularly journalists covering the Ukraine conflict.
Anna Neistat, the legal director of the foundation’s The Docket project, who made the announcement, explained that her team is pushing the EU and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to crack down on the journalists over what she called “incitement to genocide” in Ukraine.
She declined to disclose the names of individuals she wants to target, explaining that “we want them to travel to other countries and be arrested there.”
Neistat, who was born in the Soviet Union, previously worked as the Moscow director of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International’s senior director for research. During her career, she has conducted investigations in Syria, Afghanistan, and Russia’s Chechnya. She also covered the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014 and hostilities in Donbass. After the start of the full-scale Ukraine conflict in 2022, she said that this line of work had become a “priority” and a “personal” matter.
Moscow has denied allegations linked to committing war crimes in Ukraine. Like the US, Russia does not recognize the legal authority of the ICC.
In an interview with TASS on Friday, Peskov denounced the CFJ initiative to persecute Russian media workers. “I suggest that Russian reporters ask those madmen how they justify this,” he said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova urged UNESCO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to respond and investigate what she called “a judicial safari targeting Russian journalists.”
“As it turns out, the protection of journalists – the way the Clooneys understand it – is hounding them by means of politically and ethnically motivated criminal prosecution,” she said, suggesting that the couple is engaged in a “Russophobic” campaign because it pays well in the West.
Vasily Piskaryov, the head of the State Duma committee on foreign interference in domestic affairs, stated that Russia won’t leave the CFJ’s actions unanswered, adding that Russian MPs will consider branding the NGO as ‘undesirable’, a move that would essentially ban operations in the country.