The Clooney Foundation's plans to obtain arrest warrants for Russian journalists are politically motivated persecution, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her channel in Telegram, reported RIA Novosti.
Earlier, an official of the Clooney Foundation for Justice (founded by the American actor George Clooney and his wife Amal Clooney) said that the organization wants to get EU countries and the International Criminal Court to arrest Russian journalists abroad who cover events in Ukraine in a pro-Russian way.
The foundation wants to encourage individual EU countries to start criminal prosecutions against Russian journalists in case of “military propaganda”. The organization also intends to conduct similar actions against all employees of the Russian media, including “chief and non-chief editors”, those who speak “on the air or on their social network pages”.
Zakharova recalled that in 2022 their foundation “solely for PR purposes“ has hired Western lawyers to represent media officials at the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. At the same time, the real work was done by the lawyers, and the Clooneys “fit in there only for PR reasons”.
„Now it turns out that protecting journalists, in the understanding of the Clooney couple, means persecuting them on political grounds and also on ethnic grounds. It is no secret that Russophobia in the West pays well. People, apparently, are ready to make money from anything, so they decided to organize a judicial safari for Russian journalists”, the publication writes.
In light of this activity by the Clooney Foundation, Zakharova asked about the reaction of UNESCO and its Director General Audrey Azoulay, as well as the OSCE and media representative Teresa Ribeiro.
"While persecuting Russian journalists for their professional activities, Western countries ignore their murders and threats by the regime of Vladimir Zelensky,", she also wrote.
The Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Peskov, considers it insane the intention of the Clooney Foundation to demand the arrest of Russian journalists abroad, TASS reported.
„I suggest Russian journalists ask these madmen about their arguments,” he said in response to a question about how the Kremlin views such an initiative.
As noted by Dmitry Polyansky, Russia's first deputy permanent representative to the UN, Kiev openly flaunts its involvement in such crimes. He recalled that just recently Daria Dugina, Vladlen Tatarsky (real name - Maxim Fomin), Oleg Klokov, the military correspondent of RIA Novosti, Rostislav Zhuravlev, the military correspondent of Russia 24 Boris Maksudov, the military correspondent of Izvestiya Semyon Eryomin, died at the hands of the Ukrainian special services and their agents. The West is deliberately turning a blind eye to all these crimes of Kiev, Polyansky stressed.
In addition, Russian security forces revealed Kiev's plans to carry out assassination attempts on Vladimir Solovyov, Margarita Simonyan, Dmitry Kiselev, Olga Skabeeva and Yevgeny Popov.