Disclaimer: Asymmetrical Haircuts is produced as a podcast, meaning it is meant to be listened to and not read. Because of this, we recommend that you listen to the episode while reading, because the written word does not do justice to the emotion or tone used by our speakers. However, because we recognise there might be bandwidth issues or you might be using a hearing aid, we have provided written transcripts for all our available episodes.

Episode 88 – Prosecuting military actions with Carolyn Edgerton

Carolyn Edgerton: And the targeting with these weapon systems is going to invariably involve advanced planning and coordination and approval from a higher level command authority. So that’s a huge change.

[INTRO TUNE]

This is Asymmetrical Haircuts Podcast with Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg.

All rise.

Janet: Hi, Steph!

Stephanie: Hi, Janet! 

Janet: So during the Ukraine conflict, there was already a lot of discussion about bombing campaigns and wars and targeting civilian infrastructure, especially hospitals. What is a military objective? What is disproportionate attack? And this discourse has intensified with the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which followed the October 7th Hamas attacks. And today we’re going to focus on what you actually do when you get into court in order to prove these kinds of war crimes.

Stephanie: The idea we had for this podcast is that we’ll focus specifically on the prosecution of alleged war crimes committed during military campaigns and sieges. And we’ll be especially also talking about hospitals.

Janet: And we have a great guest, Carolyn Edgerton.  Hi, Carolyn.

Carolyn Edgerton: Hello.

Janet: And Carolyn’s a Canadian lawyer with 30 years of experience in domestic and international criminal investigations and prosecutions, especially as a trial attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which we will probably use the acronym from now on of ICTY.

Stephanie: Carolyn was the one in charge for the part of the trial of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić related to the shelling and sniping of civilians in Sarajevo. She also worked on the investigation and trial of other Serb and Bosnian Serb officials and officers whose trial focused on part on the siege in Sarajevo, like General Stanislav Galić, Bosnian Serb politician Momčilo Krajišnik, former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, Bosnian Serb general Dragomir Milošević and Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić

Janet: Thank you, Stef, for working your way through all of the names from the region there so that I didn’t have to struggle my way through it. And just as a side note, I think you found this out, Steph, she started her field experience in 1991 with the allegations of mass atrocities in post-Soviet Lithuania as a lawyer with the Canadian Justice Department’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Unit. And that’s especially interesting to me since I’m partly based here in Vilnius.

Stephanie: But more recently, Carolyn has been working with civil society investigators and prosecutors on Ukraine on getting justice and accountability for crimes of sexual and gender-based violence, as well as shelling and sniping.

So Carolyn, from your time at the ICTY, can you walk us through what kind of jurisprudence was established there when you look at military campaigns, when you look at shellings and attacks on hospitals? And then I’m talking about the news agency thing that we like to hear. What did they rule for the first time? And what are some of the aspects that you covered in your trials?

Carolyn Edgerton: Sure, it’s an interesting question because much of the jurisprudence, of course, involved the trial chambers looking to customary international law and international humanitarian law and applying their provisions to the facts in our cases. But there’s a number of landmark findings. And in many ways, those findings in the specific areas that I think I wanted to talk about came to serve as some kind of a road map for us as prosecutors.

So it started with the Galić case. So General Stanislav Galić was the second of three core commanders, so a commander of the forces that encircled Sarajevo throughout the conflict. And actually, when I say conflict and encircled Sarajevo, perhaps I should be more precise. In the cases against General Galić, against General Dragomir Milošević, the third Sarajevo-Romanija Corps commander, and against Radovan Karadžić, former president of Republika Srpska, against Ratko Mladić, the head of the army of Republika Srpska, these cases all referred to the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps campaign of shelling and sniping against civilians in Sarajevo.

And in relation to those cases, the prosecution alleged the killing and wounding of thousands of civilians. So just in terms of landmarks, Galić, the Galić case, was the first time terror had been charged as a war crime under the ICTY statute. When I talk about roadmaps, the trial chamber judgment in the Galić case did a number of things. It set the elements of the offense of attack on civilians in place, referring to indiscriminate attacks and disproportionate attacks, and it defined the test for proportionality. It also set the elements of the crime of terror in place.

Stephanie: Carolyn, I’m just going to break in here because I realized with my obsession with the former Yugoslavia, I didn’t think to put in one of those Reuters paragraphs with everything about the Bosnian war. So just for our listeners who haven’t followed that, we’re talking about the war in Bosnia after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. It’s from 1992 to 1995, and during that war, there was a period of I believe 33 months that Sarajevo was under siege. Sarajevo is a city that sits in a bit of a valley, and there were surrounded by mountains, and Sarajevo and the city was in the valley, and the Bosnian Serb army, known as the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, was in the mountains sniping down at the citizens below. And there you have the famous pictures of sniper alley with people running to cross the streets not to be shot. And those are some of the most enduring images of the Bosnian war. And that was one of the cases that was really emblematic for the ICTY. 

There’s a couple of particularly bad episodes in the Bosnian war. There are the camps. There is basically the siege of Sarajevo. And then you have the Srebrenica genocide. So this is really, really emblematic. So I wanted to give a bit of that background very briefly, very news agency style. And now we’ll go back to Janet.

Janet: Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on some of the decisions that were made just because there’s this huge discourse that I’m reading at the moment about disproportionality, about targeting when it comes to bombing. And of course later, I think maybe we’ll delve a little bit more into protected spaces like hospitals, which is the big issue just as we’re recording this on Friday, the 17th of November.

But can you very basically lay out what kinds of decisions did the ICTY come out with on how to assess disproportionality? What are the things that I should be thinking of now when I’m reading about what’s happening in both Ukraine and Palestine?

Carolyn Edgerton: So if you want me to speak specifically about proportionality, I’ll be very happy to. And I think it will lead quite naturally to the issue that you highlighted about or regarding attacks on hospitals. 

So let me just start with international humanitarian law for a minute. So in order for a shelling attack to be considered proportionate, the expected or foreseeable loss of civilian life or damage to civilian objects should not be excessive relative to the concrete and direct military advantage. And if I was writing this, I might put in bold concrete and direct military advantage that’s anticipated. And if that anticipated harm is excessive, and just a nota bene in there, the Rome Statute calls for that anticipated harm to be clearly excessive. But if that anticipated harm is excessive, the principle of proportionality actually calls for the attack to be cancelled or suspended, among other things.

Now, in Galić, assessing proportionality, the Galić trial chamber said that it was necessary to kind of examine whether a well-informed person in the circumstances of the attacker or in judgment language, the actual perpetrator, making reasonable use of the information available to them at that time could have expected excessive civilian casualties to result from the attack. But here’s the thing. The guidance of the Galić trial chamber is very useful, but measuring what might be considered excessive is somewhat more difficult. It depends on, of course, the circumstances, but if we were to ask an academic, a military commander, or someone who works at the ICRC, or me, about the interpretation of excessive, I think we’d probably get three different answers because I’m not sure, but I think sometimes the proportionality test, or proportionality, I think, implies a value judgement if we are not careful.

Janet: Let me pin you a bit, Carolyn, on that then. Surely didn’t the trial chamber and the appeals chamber later actually put something down that we can then look at later and say, okay, so that’s how it is?

Carolyn Edgerton: I think I’ve given you the test from the Galić case, and because I’m not an appellate lawyer, you know that is not something that pops to my mind immediately. But I think just to kind of say that’s what it is, or is that what it is, I think, or I’d like to move away a little bit from Galić to a decision in a case that I wasn’t directly involved in, either at the prosecutions or the investigation stage, and it’s the Kupreškić trial chamber decision, which, like many of the ICTY judgments, offers useful analysis and commentary on the interpretations of international humanitarian law.

What the Kupreškić decision did, or the language they used, kind of resonated with me, and does today, because it really illustrates how international courts for the chambers in my former tribunal worked to ensure the balance between military necessity, the principle of military necessity, and the principle of humanity, which are two of the guiding principles under which international humanitarian law should be interpreted. 

So the Kupreškić decision said that the prescriptions of Articles 57 and 58 of Additional Protocol 1 should be interpreted. These are the prescriptions that deal with protection of civilians, should be interpreted so as to construe as narrowly as possible the discretionary power to attack belligerence, and by the same token, so as to expand the protection accorded to civilians.

Stephanie: And when you’re talking about Additional Protocols, of course we’re talking about the Geneva Conventions, just to get everybody on the same page.

Carolyn Edgerton: And this is one thing I do have written in front of me. In one paragraph that particularly struck me in their judgment, they made the point that in the case of repeated attacks, all or most of them falling within the gray area between indisputable legality and unlawfulness, it might be warranted to conclude that the cumulative effect of such acts entails that they may not be in keeping with international law. So this pattern of repeated attack might turn out to jeopardize excessively the lives and assets of civilians contrary to the demands of humanity. And the Kupreškić decision has been referred to, this paragraph has been referred to, in subsequent trial chamber judgments. When we’re speaking about proportionality, the Kupreškić decision really stresses the importance of weighing the humanitarian consequences of an attack. And says, I think, that repeated use of the same weapon or the same kind of attack in a certain situation may be found unlawful. So they take the question of proportionality, they examine the question of proportionality from a humanitarian point of view.

Stephanie: Yeah, let me ask a very basic question about the proportionality test, because one of the things I get a lot from editors and people who are probably on Twitter, but people who had birthday parties and stuff, is just like, what is the proportionality test and isn’t there just some kind of calculation that you can do about X amount of weapons for X amount of collateral damage? Is there such a calculation? And if there isn’t a calculation, but it’s on a case by case, who makes it and what is their basis? Is it what a judge thinks it’s proportional or what a judge thinks that a military commander should think is proportional?

Carolyn Edgerton: The proportionality test is really simply, is I think a kind of a three stage process.

A commander should ask themselves whether the object in question, by its nature, its purpose, its location, or its use makes an effective contribution to military action. Right?  So if the answer is yes, the next question would be whether its total or partial destruction, its neutralization, etc. would confer a definite, a concrete and direct military advantage. And if so, whether the foreseeable collateral damage outweighs the military advantage. So it’s a test, and it should be, as I’ve tried to explain it, a kind of a one size fits all kind of test, because it actually doesn’t matter, just responding to the point that you made, how many missiles are used, it doesn’t matter how big the missiles are, that doesn’t make any difference as to what the test should be. It’s the same test.

And disproportionate attacks, because I was a prosecutor for so many years, I want to come back to that, attacks which are found to be disproportionate might give rise to an inference that civilians were the object of those attacks.

Janet: I’d like to just pull us a little bit towards the direction of what’s been in the news most currently, is both the bombings of and now we have the, we see Israeli forces, IDF forces, within one of the hospitals in Gaza. And we know that in Ukraine as well, there were bombing campaigns against hospitals there. And wondering again, if you look back at your time at the ICTY, what jurisprudence or what cases might we be able to see then being cited later, if there was ever anything that came to the International Criminal Court on hospitals and the level of protection that they still get under international humanitarian law?

Carolyn Edgerton: Sure, I can answer the question in two parts, but I think I’d like to make a clarification about Sarajevo.

In the Sarajevo cases, we charged a number of scheduled incidents, scheduled shelling and sniping incidents, individual incidents, that we had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt as illustrative of the campaign of terror against the civilians of the city. And shelling a hospital was not one of those scheduled incidents. The scale and longevity of the attacks against Sarajevo were so great that the idea was that the schedules, or the scheduled incidents, were representative of the campaign. And we called significant evidence about the campaign, as well as the scheduled incidents.

So now in Sarajevo, there were three hospitals. The Dobrinja Hospital, the State Hospital and the Koševo Hospital. And while shelling and sniping affected the function of all the hospitals, the accounts around shelling hospitals in all four cases I was involved in really focused on the Koševo Hospital. Events there occupied a lot of our time because what happened at the Koševo Hospital and at the other ones was directly linked to the campaign. Our broad evidence was that these cases of attacking civilian populations included attacks on medical facilities.

Quickly, just to touch on the law. So attacking hospitals and other medical facilities is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. And that protection extends to the wounded and sick staff of those facilities, ambulance, anything that might be marked with the red cross or the red crescent. And that protection never ends unless those facilities are used by a party to the conflict to commit completely outside of their humanitarian functions, and act, and I say it in, I use my hands to indicate, quotes, “harmful to the enemy”, because that’s the language of international humanitarian law. So an example might be using a hospital facility as a base from which to launch an attack against the opposing party, using a part of a hospital facility as a weapons depot, using a part of a hospital facility as a barracks, but those are very broad examples and not rooted in anything factual whatsoever and would be, if we were considering an actual attack, very nuanced. The law is that, in case of doubt, as to whether any of these establishments are used to commit one of those acts, they should be presumed not to be so used, which I think is very important. So if a determination is made that a medical establishment loses that protection and becomes a military target, the commander has to engage in the proportionality test we just spoke about and ask themselves whether the foreseeable collateral damage would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage. And as I said, if it was the ICC, it would be clearly excessive.

And then even if there’s a decision to attack, the attackers are still bound by the principle of precautions to do everything feasible to avoid or minimize the harm to patients and medical personnel. And I don’t know if you can hear the drilling that is going on in my neighbour’s house next door.

Janet: I can hear it now. Thanks for mentioning it, Carolyn. We’ll carry on anyway. Sorry, listeners. There we go. It’s what happens.

Carolyn Edgerton: And just to round it off or to round off the law, the Gallage Appeal Chamber applying international humanitarian law expressly found that military activity does not permanently turn a protected facility into a military target. It’s a military target only so long, I think the words were as is reasonably necessary for the opposing side to respond to the enemy activity.

Stephanie: You’ve talked to some of the things that we hear as a defense and that we heard as a defense at the ICTY and that we’re also hearing the kind of same arguments from Russia and Israel, combatants were hiding in protected places, civilian casualties are inflated by the enemy. And one thing I’ve been hearing a lot about in the Israeli case is the enemy is using human shields in protected places. And I’m wondering why that is such an issue?  And I read something and I wonder if you can shed your light on that. Some argument where somebody says, well, if Israel says that all the people in the hospitals are human shields, maybe the calculation for proportionality changes because if human shields get killed, somehow that tally goes to the people holding them as human shields and not to the people attacking them. So in this case, and this is a very concrete example, so I don’t know if you want to talk concretely about that, but in this case it would be if Israel says they’re human shields, that means that if they get killed, it’s on Hamas and not on Israel. I really don’t know what to make of this argument, so I was wondering if you did.

Carolyn Edgerton: I can give you my personal opinion, and I think human shields should factor into the proportionality assessment. And I think some states, if I remember correctly from my time at the ICTY, because we looked into state practice on this, I think the UK position is that human shields factor into the proportionality assessment. And this question actually came up again and again in Sarajevo. For example, Dr. Karadžić argued that the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina was responsible for civilian casualties because it didn’t remove the civilians from the military objectives or because it abused civilian objects for military purposes. And one example would be using a mobile mortar to fire from the Koševo hospital to arguably attract return fire from the SSarajevo-Romanija Corps. We can look to, again, Articles 57 and 58 of Additional Protocol 1. And when we talk about human shields, I think that’s Article 51 of Additional Protocol 1. And they specifically say that the presence of the civilian populations shouldn’t be used to protect certain points or areas from military attack or to shield military objectives from attack.

So, Dr.Karadžić or the Trial Chamber, when they dealt with that issue, took this on board. They specifically recalled that the parties to the conflict are under an obligation to remove civilians and to avoid locating military objectives in or near densely populated areas. But here’s what they said: They said that the failure of a party to abide by this obligation does not relieve the attacking side of its duty to abide by the principles of distinction and proportionality when launching an attack.

So I think this is one example of an interpretation or practical application of international humanitarian law to the facts that we could see used in eventual proceedings. So even if civilians are intentionally kept in the vicinity of military objectives, I think the principle of precautions still apply.

Janet: I find it really interesting, Carolyn, to hear your references and the clarity with which you approach this, because I’m aware of so many different bits of information coming out, so many different spins, essentially, on the procedure of different conflicts. And I’m wondering how you dealt with this mass of contradictory, maybe even disinformation that was being spun around the situations that you went to investigate. Going there physically, that makes the difference to see exactly how it is, and then you can really come to some sense of what the truth is. Is that how best to deal with those contradictory narratives?

Carolyn Edgerton: With respect to the individual incidents, we dealt with that in a number of ways. Of course, we were getting these allegations while the conflict was ongoing. The initial investigations were done by local experts, local law enforcement, who at that point in the conflict, because of the nature of the conflict, actually had the expertise, whether from living through the siege and going out to repeatedly investigate the attacks, the shelling and sniping, or from their personal and professional experience. You know, some of these people might have been engineers by training before they were called up to service or joined their police forces. They might have been graphic designers. Everybody, because of the situation, effectively became a local expert. So we relied heavily on these investigative reports, which were done according to protocols and under strict procedures. So that was the first thing.

We also used and benefited from the insights of international military representatives and civil servants who came to spend significant periods of time in the Sarajevo Theatre. I think of the UN military observers, we refer to them by the acronym UNMOS, whose job it was to monitor the incoming and outgoing fire, origins of fire, impacts, whose job it was to negotiate pauses in the fighting, to deliver protests to the warring factions. And they came from many different countries.

We relied on the UN military commanders, commanders of the United Nations Protection Force, UNProFor, whose job it was to, among other things, raise protests, negotiate, and negotiate critical issues at the highest level.

We relied on civilian representatives, as I mentioned, political affairs officers at different levels, who dealt with the same issues in their own way. And these people were stationed in Sarajevo for lengthy periods of time, so they were effectively our eyes and ears.

So we overlaid the material related to the individual incidents with the more general information about the campaign that we got from these sources. Eventually, of course, after the ceasefire, we traveled to Sarajevo and were able to visit all the different locations that were relevant to our prosecution of the individual scheduled incidents. Sometimes we visited them with the victims who had survived. And there we learned about things like origin of fire. We learned about and we asked about, we collected evidence about the location of the incident. Was it a military target? We had to ask ourselves that. Was it a military objective? What was hit? Just to give you an example, what was hit? Was it a weapon store, a military dispatch post, a kitchen that prepared food for local units? Was it an apartment with a sniper post on one of the upper floors? One of the scheduled incidents referred to a football game that was targeted with mortars while the game was in full swing. Was it a water line? Was it a center for the distribution of humanitarian aid, a school, a funeral? But every single one of those doesn’t give you a black and white answer, does it? If it’s a funeral, who was there? If it’s a school, was it operating as a school at the time? Where were classes being held? Where was it? Was the location impacted near any military object or military location? If so, how far away was it? Was there any evidence of military activity, operations, personnel or assets at that location at the time of the incident, immediately before or immediately after? Were civilians present? Just referring to the football game. Can we estimate how many? What were they doing at the time? Do we know their ages? How were they dressed? It makes me think of one of the scheduled incidents involving killing and injuring children who were playing in the snow in an area surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings.

So these are some of the things we looked for as we went further in our investigations and were able to go to the ground and supplement the investigative files that we had been provided by local authorities with our more detailed queries.

Stephanie: It strikes me that even with a lot of visual information that you had of the siege of Sarajevo, because maybe some of our listeners don’t remember, but when I was in high school and starting university in the 1990s, this was on TV every night, and there were cameras on these mortar attacks and bombings, you still need an immense amount of detail that you can only get from the ground. And that kind of leads me to my next question, because we see now that Israel and Ukraine is much more filmed from all sides. But the last time we’ve really seen a military campaign judged is the Sarajevo siege, which is 30 years ago. So we can see that the way that wars documented has changed a lot. But how has warfare changed and how much has it stayed the same? I know you’re deeply involved with Ukraine, and you look at some of the shelling there as well to help local prosecutors with what to look for. What is your impression of how war has shifted and how much is still the work that you did 30 years ago?

Carolyn Edgerton: How interesting. So much has changed, but so much has remained the same. I guess if I was to answer as simply as I could, I would say tactics and technology and evidence.

The tactics, when we’re talking about the use of explosive weapon systems with this wide destructive radius in populated areas, are the same. We saw this in Sarajevo with these modified air bombs, which were used against areas of the encircled city and elsewhere in 1995.

And just by way of an explanation, these modified air bombs were exactly that, bombs that would have been fired or dropped from an airplane that were modified to be fired from a ground rocket launcher, attached to four rockets, any one of which might have fizzled out at any point in time before impacting a target. So we see these explosive weapons with wide destructive radius being used in populated areas in Ukraine and in Gaza as well.

So tactics, the same. But when we talk about technology, the array of high-powered weapons with huge payloads of explosive power that’s been developed since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and being used just, for example, against Ukraine is vast. I can’t remember all of them, but if you were even to go online, there’s any number of websites that would list the different types of weapons that might have been used against Ukraine in specific attacks. And I can just, from my own experience, give you a couple of small examples. There’s these S-300 short-distance ground-to-ground missiles, Kinjal hypersonic missiles, which are launched from the air. There’s these long-range caliber missiles launched from the sea, which can carry high-explosive warheads of hundreds of kilos. There’s short-range Iskander missiles, and they can, to my recollection, generally hit with great precision their targets, but they can also carry payloads of perhaps close to 500, 700 kilos or other munitions, so bombs. And of course, there’s the drones. I think I would just refer to the… we call them the kamikaze drones. That’s the generic name for these one-way drones that crash with an explosive payload, and that includes the Shahed drones that are used against Ukraine, manufactured by Iran. So there’s the technology that’s changed, and the targeting with these weapons systems is going to invariably involve advanced planning and coordination, and approval from a higher level command authority. So that’s a huge change. I’m just talking about a drop in the bucket.

I think what’s also changed is the nature and volume of the evidence, because while I sit and think that the scale of the harm surrounding Sarajevo is massive, this has been dwarfed in many ways by the scale of the harm in Ukraine and in Gaza. And related to that, the volume of evidence, and when we’re talking about shelling, generally related to the impact, the effects of the attack, is massive. Talking about technology again, access to the internet, social media, and even the dark web has completely changed the game. The technology is something that the international accountability mechanisms are racing to keep up with. You know, thousands, just to talk about open source information, there’s literally thousands of volunteers, but also reputable organizations like Bell and Cat, who are involved in documenting analysis, verifying attacks against civilians. A challenge around that is how to authenticate that material to a standard that could potentially be used in courts. I may be in a minority, but I tend to think circumstances are responding effectively to the scale of the violence, the nature of the evidence, the technological changes are going to drive international criminal law and international accountability mechanisms in new directions. And we might even be moving towards some kind of, if I can call it like this, a democratization, of the evidence collection, so that the documentation, if we can ensure it’s collected and authenticated to an appropriate standard, is done by organizations where the international accountability mechanisms can travel.

Janet: I think you’ve set our agenda again, Carolyn, for another whole series of podcasts, because I know that we need to look at how investigations are changing, need to change. But I think for this podcast, we’ve only got enough time to probably fit in the questions we’ve had so far. As you know, we always are podcasts with some regular questions. I’m wondering how appropriate they are for you.

So one of them is whether there’s anything more that we should have asked you that we didn’t get round to asking you. And I have the feeling that that’s a Pandora’s box, so I’m going to say no to that one.

Then second one is, is there a specific court case that you always teach, always talk about, always kind of refer back to that kind of become one of your faves, or is it what we’ve already covered on the podcast?

Carolyn Edgerton: I always teach the Karadžić case because the judgment does many things. While it’s not the objective of international criminal law, I think that the judgment represents the most comprehensive historical record to date of particularly the situation in and around Sarajevo. I like to teach it because it refers to authority and issues of command and control that I think are very representative of how we see them today in other conflicts. The language of the judgment is language that is accessible to the greater population. It’s easy to understand.

In addition, it refines and further develops through commentary and analysis international humanitarian law and the law around attacking civilians, the law around the war crime of terror. And the reasoning, I think, is something that’s very useful to justice actors on the ground in conflict situations. 

Stephanie: Well, that’s my night time reading sorted. I must admit that I covered the Karadžić judgment, but I haven’t read through all of it. 

Janet: But it’s your night time reading for the next couple of weeks, I think, because they tend to be long, these judgments, don’t they? I remember it’s around a thousand pages, no?

Carolyn Edgerton: Yes.

Stephanie: Yeah. But I must say I am inspired to pick it up and read it now, because I’m kind of curious how it does refer to the current conflicts and the things you say.

But that’s not your night time reading, and that’s another one of our Asymmetrical haircuts questions, is what are you reading, watching, listening to either that you would like to recommend to our readers, either because it relates to what we were talking about, or you can talk about the stuff that you do to get away from all the war crimes and shelling business.

Carolyn Edgerton: I am an excellent baker and I love to cook. And my current reading is a cookbook by a Ukrainian woman, a chef who’s relocated to the UK. Her name is Olia Hercules, and she’s done a wonderful series of cookbooks. “Summer Kitchen” is one of them,  “home food”, and every time I’m in the UK, I’m so addicted to the recipes that she gives life to. I managed somehow to pick up another book, so I’m reading her cookbooks.

Janet: Delightful. I think you need to share a recipe for our website as well, and maybe we’ll put it on as part of the post to do this. But meanwhile, thank you so much, Carolyn, for making time. It’s taken a long time for us to manage to get together to ask you all of our very basic questions, but we really appreciate that you made time to chat to us.

Stephanie: Yeah, and what listeners don’t know is that Carolyn already made this time, and we had already had an hour plus long conversation, and then my SD card was fried and we couldn’t record it, so she even graciously agreed to come on again and talk to us again. And still we learned new things. So thank you so much, Carolyn. It was really enlightening. This gives me a kind of hope and support for whenever I get bit editors’ questions about what is a war crime and why, and why does international law say that. I can say

Janet:  Listen to the podcast! 

Stephanie: Listen to the podcast, yes.

Janet: Thank you, Carolyn.

Carolyn Edgerton: Happy to have been of help. Thank you very much.

[OUTRO MUSIC]