In a nation awash with human rights abuse, somehow the problem doesn’t register as a priority with the most popular political parties.
The major
parties, instead, prefer to stick to vague and populist platitudes and
programs.
So no
matter who wins, it looks like the nation will not summon the political will to
take on Ukraine’s corrupt law enforcement and record of international abuses
such as ill treatment, torture and, in some cases, deaths in police custody.
According
to the Interior Ministry, 51 people died in police detention in 2010, with 20
more dead in the first five months of 2011, the latest period for which statistics
are available. According to a recent study by the Kharkiv Institute of Social
Research, 62.4 percent of those detained claim they suffered abuse while in
detention, including physical beatings, while 3.8 percent claimed they were
tortured with electrical cords and other instruments.
One of the
most high profile cases involves 20-year-old Ihor Indylo, who died in Kyiv
police detention in May 2010. Security film footage shows police officer Sergiy
Pryhodko dragging an unconscious Indylo into a cell and abandoning him. He was
found dead seven hours later.
Out of
5,000 complaints about police abuse that Ukraine’s ombudsman received in 2011,
few were investigated and only 10 police officers were prosecuted. Moreover,
judges almost always side with prosecutors, human rights organizations say.
When asked
why major parties pay no attention to the issue in their programs, politicians
cite lack of space in the platform document and the need to make their campaign
pitches tight and appealing.
The ruling
Party of Regions boasts of a new criminal code taking effect on Nov. 19 and a
new law on advocacy as their major accomplishments in the human rights field.
“According
to our analysis, 80 percent of the abuse in police happens because police
officers want to force people to confess. When they have the confession, they
can base the whole case on it. This will not be the case under the new code,
which does not consider confessions as evidence in the pre-trial [stage of the]
investigation,” said Volodymyr Oliynyk, a Party of Regions parliamentarian.
Oliynyk
also praised many other traits of the newly passed legislation, like giving
more rights to lawyers, introducing bail and other safeguards.
The Party
of Region’s future plans revolve around increasing the profession’s status in
order to attract top-flight police officers.
“We have to
pay competitive salaries and benefits – scholarships for children, help with
mortgages. Then we can be on the market for the best people, better educated
and with different attitudes,” Oliynyk said, without specifying where the money
will come from.
Opposition
parties are calling for radical action, like in the former Soviet republic of
Georgia, which fired almost all of its police officers and hired new ones who
were paid livable salaries.
“The main problem of law enforcement is
massive corruption,” says Iryna Herashchenko, a member of parliament running on
Vitali Klitschko`s Udar Party.
“We will
initiate the creation of an anti-corruption bureau that will evaluate all
police officers and all other public servants, making sure that the ones who
were taking bribes, forged evidence and tortured people are (thrown) out and
put to justice. This is what was done in many countries,” Herashchenko says.
The United
Opposition, headed by Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party and Arseniy
Yatsenyuk’s Front Zmin, have more ideas about creating new bodies as well. They
suggest stripping police and prosecutors of their investigation duties and
creating a new body called the National Investigation Committee. They also
suggest creating a municipal police force to deal with misdemeanors and petty
crimes. Another idea is to give more power to the human rights ombudsman.
“We will
introduce reform of the courts, sparing them of pressure from the other branches
of power. To do this we will suggest the law about the independent financing of
the judicial branch from the state budget,” said head of the legal department
of the United Opposition headquarters Pavlo Petrenko.
Petrenko
added the opposition suggests stripping
both president and parliament of the right to appoint judges. “Judges
are to be appointed by the High Council of Justice, which would consist of the
current and retired judges,” Petrenko says.
The Communist
Party has more radical ideas. They want citizens to elect local police officers
and judges and claim this is the only way human rights violations and
corruption can be tackled.
“They will
be reporting to the community. And the community can fire them the moment they
see any corruption and other violations. This is what the rule of the people
means in practice,” says Alexandr Holub, a member of the parliament from the
Communist Party.
Kyiv Post staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska can be reached at [email protected]
