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III. Methods

This report is based on a four-week field visit to Ukraine in June and July 2005.  Two Human Rights Watch staff members conducted detailed interviews with one hundred and one people living with HIV/AIDS, injection drug users, and sex workers.  These interviews took place in Odessa, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kyiv regions, five of the regions hardest hit by HIV/AIDS.2  Interviews were open-ended and covered many topics.  Interviews were conducted in NGO, government, and donor agency offices, and at mobile HIV/AIDS and harm reduction worksites.  One Human Rights Watch staffer was provided translation assistance for interviews conducted in Ukrainian and Russian.  The second staffer conducted all interviews in Russian.  No incentives were offered or provided to persons interviewed.

Interviewees were identified largely with the assistance of Ukrainian NGOs providing services to people living with and at high risk of HIV/AIDS.  These interviewees may therefore have had greater access to harm reduction and HIV/AIDS services than the general population of people affected by HIV/AIDS.  The identity of these interviewees has been disguised with pseudonyms, and in some cases certain other identifying information has been withheld, to protect their privacy and safety.

Human Rights Watch also interviewed seven national- and regional-level health, law enforcement, and human rights officials; two local police officers; and seventy-five  representatives of international health organizations, NGOs specializing in HIV/AIDS or human rights, and health care workers and hospital administrators.  Olena A. Alekseeva, head of the Committee on Narcotic Drugs Control in Ukraine, declined to meet with Human Rights Watch.3 

All documents cited in the report are either publicly available or on file with Human Rights Watch.



[2] Ukraine is divided into twenty-seven administrative units: twenty-four oblasts (regions), two city authorities (Kyiv and Sevastopol), and the Crimean Autonomous Republic.

[3] Letters from Olena A. Alekseeva to Human Rights Watch, July 15 and July 19, 2005.


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