A judge in Virginia ruled that Confederate statues in Charlottesville are war monuments and are protected by state law.

The ruling by Judge Richard Moore comes as part of a 2017 lawsuit filed against members of the Charlottesville City Council who voted to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The decision comes nearly two years after a deadly white nationalist rally in the city left one counterprotester dead. Participants in the rally said it was organized to protest the planned removal of one of the statues.

The Monument Fund , a nonprofit that works to conserve and preserve historic monuments and memorials, filed a lawsuit in Charlottesville Circuit Court, charging the city with violating the state's monument protection law and acting outside the authority delegated to it by the state, among other charges. The lawsuit was then amended to include the statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas Stonewall Jackson.

In a letter dated April 25, Moore said that the statues of Lee and Jackson depict the men in military uniforms and on horses associated with the Civil War and are therefore considered memorials. According to Virginia law , it is illegal for local municipalities to remove war monuments without permission from the state.

"Upon a full consideration of the matter, I find that there is no other reasonable conclusion but that these statues are monuments and memorials to Lee and Jackson, as generals of the Confederate States of America, and that as such they are monuments or memorials to veterans of one of the wars listed in Va. code," Moore wrote in the letter, featured in the New York Times . "I find this conclusion inescapable. It is the very reason the statues have been complained about from the beginning. It does no good pretending."

The judge acknowledged the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and clarified that his decision is concentrated on whether the statues of Lee and Jackson qualify as war memorials under state law. He said it does not guarantee that the Fund will win the lawsuit if it goes to trial.

"But this is the only motion I am ruling on at this time, in this letter," Moore wrote. "There are still several other issues remaining in the case. So this does not mean that plaintiffs will prevail simply because I find that these statues are monuments and memorials as referred to by the statute. … They are what they obviously are, and I am just calling them what they in fact are."

