September 30-October 8, 2010, the OSCE Review Conference, traditionally organized in Warsaw (Poland), was held. During the plenary meetings, numerous non-governmental organizations of European and CIS countries had an opportunity to present their own vision of the situation and convey concern over various aspects of human rights to the attention of international organizations, government delegations and official representatives of the European institutions.
On October 7, participants of the Review Conference, with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation, had an opportunity to listen to national experts that provided a broad overview of the human rights situation in Ukraine.
The presentation on Ukrainian experience was opened and moderated by Roman Romanov, director of the Rule of Law Program of the International Renaissance Foundation, who provided the overall vision of changes that occurred in Ukraine after the presidential election and encouraged participants to make their own conclusions about the changes in terms of human rights issues.
During the speech, Yevhen Zakharov, co-chairman of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, presented participants with the outlook specially prepared by the organization for the conference and described the main problems in the field of human rights protection by the state. This concerned, first of all, the right to peaceful assembly, right to free access to information, protection against torture and abuse, right to privacy etc. In the discussion he also covered the issues of relations between civil society and new government, providing comprehensive information on the state of affairs in the different fields of human rights.
Oleh Martynenko, Chairman of the Board of UMDPL, described the main problems with provision of human rights that have arisen recently. Among those are subjective and corrupt HR policy of the new team of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, manipulation of statistics and falsification of performance indicators, ignoring appeals of NGOs, political bias of militia and great increase of cases of abuse and torture in law enforcement agencies. All mentioned factors are amplified by deliberate destruction of public control institutes initiated in 2004-2009 by the Minister Internal Affairs, Anatoliy Mohyliov.
Taras Shevchenko, director of the Media Law Institute, made a presentation about the situation in mass media and freedom of expression on the web. He emphasized inadmissibility of pressing journalists and establishing censorship towards those journalists that critically estimate activities of the government.
Ukrainian experts expressed hope that such attention and support from the international community will contribute to improvement of human rights situation in Ukraine.
Source: European Space
