Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Valeria Lutkovska has said she hopes for the speedy ratification by Ukraine of the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence.
“I hope that Ukraine will soon ratify the European convention on domestic violence,” she said at a briefing in Kyiv on Thursday as part of a roundtable entitled “The development of a system to prevent domestic violence.”
Lutkovska noted that there was rising domestic violence in Ukraine.
“Unfortunately, official statistics obtained from the Social Policy Ministry shows that about 85,000 complaints of domestic violence were sent in the first nine months of this year. That is, the figure is concerning,” she said.
Of this number, she said, almost 1,000 victims were children, about 8,000 victims were men, and a fairly significant part were women.
“But the problem is that these are the official statistics. This means that victims found the opportunity to apply to the state authorities and report it. Unfortunately, domestic violence is a more latent and hidden problem, which does not always find its way out, and state agencies and public organizations are not always aware of this problem,” Lutkovska said.
In this connection, she said that the joint dialog between society and government agencies, in particular, the parliament, was important.
Lutkovska said she hoped that the Verkhovna Rada would ratify the convention.
“The ratification, in this case, will require the introduction of a huge number of amendments to national legislation, therefore we hope for the understanding by the parliament of this problem and the respective work of the Verkhovna Rada for the introduction of respective amendments,” she said.
