How to avoid the mistakes of the Budapest memorandum: Venislavsky on security guarantees for Ukraine/Office of the President
The representative of the President in the Constitutional Court, Fyodor Venislavsky, noted that any new international agreements on the security of Ukraine should include legal obligations.
During the only telethon, Venislavsky noted that we already have the sad experience of the Budapest memorandum.
What legal obligations mean
The Budapest memorandum is called “on security guarantees”, but it does not contain any legal obligations from the parties that guaranteed our security and signed the memorandum. Therefore, any new international agreements should take this into account.
Any new international agreements, and this should be an international multilateral agreement on guarantees for the security of Ukraine, should be based on specific legal obligations of all countries – signatories to this international treaty. That is, there should be not just some declarations, but specific obligations,” said Venislavsky.
For example, what will Britain or the United States do if someone threatens Ukraine. When Russia threatened Ukraine for several months before a full-scale offensive and amassed troops, not a single country that was the guarantor of the Budapest memorandum took action to somehow prevent this threat. Despite the fact that the threat is a direct violation of the UN Charter.
That is, there should be a prescribed algorithm of actions for any violations of international law: the threat of force, the accumulation of troops near the border, etc. For each threat, there should be an algorithm for the actions of guarantors.
