A new Committee for investigating Human Rights violations is established in Ukraine, Gazeta.ua reports. Twelve leading lawyers and former political prisoners will collect evidence of such violations that allegedly took place during the peaceful protests and forward the collected facts to the international tribunal.The Committee’s mission is to investigate violations that occurred starting from November 30, 2013. The criminals, believed to have committed murders, mayhem, tortures and kidnapping of citizens, will be brought to justice, the Committee representatives announced during the press-conference on Wednesday. The newly-created Human Rights watch body will focus its efforts on rehabilitating of violated human rights, building awareness via explanatory work and assembling a Black Book of Human Rights Violations in Ukraine.
“We will collect primary data on the cases of human rights violations and publish those facts with legal evaluation. We will also scrutinize how the law-enforcement authorities investigate reported violations and we will control the observance of justice; the outputs will be directed to the international institutes. It is our firm belief that the infamous Berkut [“Golden Eagle” in Ukrainian, Berkut is a special-police unit known for its outrageous violence towards journalists during the latest Kyiv confrontation] cannot be granted an amnesty together with pardoned activists,” – said Stanislav Batron, the Institute of State and Law research assistant.
According to Mr. Brerziuk, “Police today do not fulfill their function but misuse their power, organize assault and beatings of journalists; special police units had become punitive organs. Law enforcement authorities must be reformatted. We have already spotted several police officers that should be either hospitalized or imprisoned“. He also reminded that placing Defense Force departments into the authority of police is qualified as a crime.
As planned by the Committee, the Black Book assemblage brakes down into gathering information regarding the facts of human rights violations and classifying gathered data according to the criteria suitable for their evaluation by international institutions. The Black Book is supposed to be e-published and available to the general public.
“The Committee is not appropriating the power of any authority; what we are going to do is to collect testimonies of the injured party, as well as police officers,” informed Mykola Sirjy, the Institute of State and Law senior staff scientist. He assured that the human rights advocates are equally ready to evaluate violations reported by soldiers and other authority reps engaged in protests suppression.
The scientist further stated that the torture of Mykhaylo Havryluk has already received its legal evaluation. Every case will be also directed to the Attorney General with the “no statute of limitations” reminder and request of making the guilty and those who did not obstruct accountable.
“The prosecutor’s office is obliged to take custody of such persons, and to start a criminal investigation for the rest. Suspicions of committing a crime should be publicly announced,” – Siriy stressed.
Volodymyr Vasylenko, Judge of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and Commission Chairman, noted that criminals can be officially judged only in the European Court for Human Rights. He mentioned that although this is a long procedure, it is also an effective one.
“Even in our country there still exist sane judges that are capable of making fair decisions. Besides, article 163 of the European Convention states that one country can sue another one in which human rights are violated. And we all know hoe many foreign journalists have suffered, so we have a formal occasion,” – he added.
Translated by anonymous translator from glavnoe.ua
