Human Rights Watch welcomes the new periodic report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The report is an important opportunity to reinvigorate discussions on addressing key human rights issues in Ukraine.
We would like to highlight several concerns described in the report, some of which have been areas of extensive Human Rights Watch research.
First, Human Rights Watch, together with Amnesty International, has documented cases in which Ukrainian government authorities, pro-government paramilitary groups, and Russia-backed separatists have held civilians in prolonged, arbitrary, and incommunicado detention, and have subjected them to beatings and other physical abuses. In many instances the cases documented were enforced disappearances, in which the detentions were followed by denials of the detentions, or refusal to provide any information on the whereabouts or fate of the detainees. In all the cases we documented, the captors held victims on suspicion of collaborating with the other side. A report we published in July 2016 documented, among other things, that 18 people had been victims of enforced disappearances while detained on the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) premises in Kharkiv through the end of that month, some for months at a time and one for as long as 16 months. In the two weeks after the report’s publication, 13 people were released from detention in the Kharkiv SBU, but remain victims of enforced disappearances as the authorities still do not acknowledge the detentions. The military prosecutor’s office pledged to investigate. As noted in the OHCHR report, at least five people are believed to remain forcibly disappeared, held in Kharkiv.
Ukraine’s military prosecutor should prioritize and personally oversee an investigation into allegations of enforced disappearances by the SBU, and Ukraine’s allies and international partners should ensure that it does this.
Second, in areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions controlled by Russia-backed separatists, we found that local security services operate without any adherence to the rule of law, subject to no oversight whatsoever, and with complete impunity. People whom they detain are simply at their mercy, and the relatives have no one to turn to for assistance. In one case we documented, a man spent three months in late 2015 and early 2016 in the custody of local security services custody, cuffed to a water pipe, and was badly beaten.
We believe that many other incidents of torture take place but that the pervasive climate of raw fear that we witnessed, fostered by rebel authorities in Donestsk region, prevent people from discussing or seeking justice for them. Making the region even more isolated from the outside world, in November local authorities expelled several Russian journalists and People in Need, a nongovernmental organization that had provided humanitarian assistance.
Third, we have also documented the significant hardship civilians face crossing the line of contact and support OHCHR’s call to review restrictions on freedom of movement and to take measures to shorten processing time and provide necessary facilities.
Fourth, as noted in the OHCHR report, a handful of Ukraine’s volunteer battalion members are currently on trial for violent crimes committed during the armed conflict, and trials are also under way for the 2014 political violence in Odesa. We are extremely disturbed that ultranationalists have been allowed to disrupt proceedings and intimidate judges and defendants. The authorities take some, but inadequate, measures to rein in the situation. Unless the government takes robust measures, ultranationalists will become further emboldened to severely undermine justice.
Finally, Human Rights Watch continues to be alarmed by the human rights crisis that has attended Russia’s occupation of Crimea. Russian authorities are prosecuting people for publicly opposing Russian occupation of Crimea, further shrinking space for free speech and freedom of association. The OHCHR report notes Russia’s banning of Mejlis, the self-elected representative body for Crimean Tatars, and the persecution of its activists, including the forced psychiatric confinement of one of Mejlis’s deputy chairmen, Ilmi Umerov. Just last week, Russian authorities sent a Crimean human rights activist, Emir Hussein Kuku, who had been held in pretrial custody since February 2016 on bogus charges of membership in a terrorist organization, to forced psychiatric confinement.
Russia’s forced imposition of Russian citizenship on people in Crimea violates international humanitarian law and has severely interfered with residents’ access to healthcare and barred them from working in certain professions. It is important that the UN continue to condemn Russia’s abuses in Crimea, and for the Human Rights Council to maintain scrutiny of the situation in Ukraine and reflect in upcoming resolutions the concerns and recommendations of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
