United Nations investigators have been blocked from investigating detention centers in occupied eastern Ukraine, and fear allegations of severe conditions are true, High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Hussein said in his opening address to the UN’s Human Rights Council on June 13.
And according to a report by the United Nations Office of the High Commission on Human Rights dated June 2, the abuses in the occupied east are only getting worse.
“Arbitrary deprivation of liberty has reached an unprecedented scale in the territories controlled by the armed groups, with a broad network of unrecognized detention facilities,” the report reads.
But with information from the east lacking, the Ukrainian security service was the main subject of criticism in a separate report by the UN’s Special Rapporteur, presented at the 32nd meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which opened on June 13.
Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, is running secret detention centers, and using torture and ill-treatment to extract confessions or to intimidate victims, the report reads.
Though Ukrainian volunteer battalions were responsible for illegal detention and torture in the past, evidence from late 2015 and early 2016 now implicates the SBU, the report said.
The SBU has twice been accused of preventing United Nations investigators accessing suspected secret detention centers in government-controlled territories.
The Special Rapporteur, an expert working on behalf of the UN, was denied access to a military base at Mariupol airport that was suspected of operating as an illegal detention center, according to his report.
The investigator announced his visit to the military base in advance, but was still refused access, the report reads. Similar secret detention centers are reportedly housed in SBU buildings in Kharkiv and Kramatorsk.
“You can’t just walk into any airport, in any city, in any country in the world without the appropriate mandate. It’s an issue of security,” said SBU spokeswoman Olena Gytlianska in response to the UN claims. However, Gytlianska admitted that she did not know the details of the case.
In the June 2 report, the Office of the High Commission of Human Rights describes several known cases of arbitrary detention by the SBU. In March 2016, the office was aware of the names of 15 men and one woman said to be held by the SBU at a site in Kharkiv. Though no detainees were found at the site, “a reliable source” told the office that detainees were moved for 24 hours, while the Ombudsperson’s Office of Ukraine conducted an investigation.
In another example, a resident of Mariupol was held in an illegal detention facility and reportedly severely tortured and electrocuted by three men, who wanted him to identify supporters of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the June 2 report said. When he was released from custody under house arrest in March 2015, he was apprehended by the SBU and held at its Kharkiv office until his release in February 2016.
“The SBU continued to deny practicing secret or incommunicado detention, the mere existence of unofficial detention facilities, and the whereabouts and fate of individuals who were forcibly disappeared,” the June 2 report said.
In May, a team from the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture cut a trip to Ukraine short when it was denied access to places where it suspected the SBU was holding illegal detainees. It was only the second time the Subcommittee halted a mission, according to a press release by the Subcommittee.
“This was a misunderstanding, which has since been resolved,” Gytlianska said. “We gave them full access to detainees. But they wanted to get into offices where classified documents were being processed.” She said that the detainees were “separatists and terrorists.”
Under the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, Ukraine is required to grant “unhindered access” to UN investigators who come to search “places where people are being deprived of their liberties,” UN spokeswoman Elizabeth Throssell said.
But Thrussell also said that the Special Rapporteur is not bound by the same Optional Protocol. “It’s frustrating when he is denied access. But the reason why the Sub-Committee (on Prevention of Torture) makes a big deal out of not being granted access is that the terms of the protocol have been violated,” she said.
The Sub-Committee has since held a “positive discussion” with the Government of Ukraine and plans to return and complete its investigation, but no date has been announced, according to the press release.
Meanwhile, the SBU has pointed fingers at the self-styled “Luhansk People’s Republic” for not cooperating with UN investigations. “On the side of the terrorists, in Luhansk, they didn’t let them in (to detention centers) at all. And no one is talking about this,” Gytlianska said.
But the UN is increasingly concerned by arbitrary detention on the side of the Ukrainian government.
Especially worrying is that there is no body to investigate the law enforcement agencies. Despite the “systemic pattern of complaints about ill-treatment” at the hands of SBU agents, these agents remain “untouchable” without a system of oversight, according to the Special Rapporteur’s report.
The Special Rapporteur “could find no evidence of a system of oversight that could effectively investigate any abuses that might occur, or protect detainees against them,” the report said.
In February 2016, the government formally established the State Bureau of Investigation to investigate crimes committed by members of law enforcement, high-ranking officials, judges, and anti-corruption officials. But as of yet, the bureau exists only on paper.
This is not the first time the UN has investigated arbitrary detention in Ukraine. In 2009, the UN issued a report calling attention to arbitrary detention, torture, and forced confessions at the hands of the militsia, then the Ukrainian police force.
Now the SBU, Ukraine’s special law-enforcement agency for combating terrorism, faces similar allegations, even as the country makes strides to reform its institutions, including its security apparatus.
Hussein applauded the progress made in the detention centers that the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture was able to visit.
“My office has access to detention facilities under control of the government, and there has been improvement in (detention) conditions, and in terms of specific individual cases,” Hussein said.
