Her husband, Vladislav Sodel, a photographer for
Kommersant newspaper, was at her side. When a group of men attacked
Olha, he tried to protect her, calling for help from the police
officers who stood nearby. But standing in the shadow of the Interior
Ministry headquarters, the officers did nothing. Snitsarchuk ended up
in the emergency room with a split lip and multiple bruises; Sodel
was also injured in the assault.
According
to the independent news website Ukrainska Pravda and research by
social media users, the journalists’ assailants had been working
for Ukraine’s ruling Party of Regions, and had already
been involved in a clash with members of the opposition.
The
incident outraged local journalists, and sparked
a week of protests in Kyiv – mainly outside government buildings,
including the Cabinet and Interior Ministry. Nearly two weeks later,
on May 30th,
a spokesman for the Interior Ministry stated that disciplinary action
was being taken against the police officers for their “failure to
act”.
The
attack on Snitsarchuk and Sodel has reignited interest in previous
cases of violence against journalists. The most notorious of these is
the brutal murder of reporter Georgy Gongadze
by a group of police officers in 2000, which remains mired in
uncertainty and political intrigue.
Eight years ago, the European
Court of Human Rights found
Ukraine in
violation of its human rights obligations, due to its failure to
protect a journalist’s life, and the absence of an effective
investigation into Gongadze’s
disappearance and death. More recently, journalists were targeted
during the 2012 parliamentary elections, marked out for concern in a
recent
resolution
from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on ‘The
state of media freedom in Europe’.
The
embattled Ukrainian press is not alone in its struggle. Throughout
the region, notably across the Black Sea to Azerbaijan and Turkey,
government constraints on media freedoms are tightening. These
restrictions are being enacted both on the street and at the
legislative level, and across all types of media.
As reported by the
Committee to Protect Journalists, the protests consuming Turkey have
put journalists in an especially vulnerable position. Journalists
covering clashes between law enforcement officers and protesters have
been targeted: prevented from carrying out their work; physically
assaulted; and temporarily detained by police. The Ankara office of
the daily newspaper Sol was attacked by police on Sunday, reported
the news editor there. The violence of the crackdown has been widely
reported in the international media, and the political consequences
for the Erdogan government remain uncertain.
To
the east, Turkey’s neighbor Azerbaijan has long had a reputation
for its intolerance towards the free press. There, recent cases of
police
brutality
against journalists at a Gezi Park solidarity protest in Baku provide
a stark reminder of the country’s ongoing failure to meet its
international human rights obligations. The clampdown continues
inside Parliament, which has just passed a bill criminalizing online
defamation.
Prompted by a sharp
rise in social media activism over the past three years, the bill
makes online defamation an offense punishable by imprisonment.
Despite international appeals for the bill’s veto (including from
OSCE Special Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic
and Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Nils Muiznieks),
it was signed by President Aliyev last week. In the wake of the
Eurozone economic crisis, EU institutions have lost significant
political clout in their dealings with members of the European
Neighborhood Policy Eastern Partnership initiative.
ENP member
states, including Ukraine and Azerbaijan, are increasingly
nationalistic in their administration of human rights. The public
sector reform needed to address the widespread levels of corruption
is by no means a priority for either country.
In
this sense, the failure of the Kyiv police to protect media
representatives on May 18th
exemplifies Ukraine’s deteriorating commitments to media freedom
and official accountability on the part of the government. The
subsequent reluctance of the government to conduct a proper
investigation into the incident reflects deeper levels of political
malfeasance.
Ukrainians have marked police out as a source of
particular concern with regard to corruption: in
Transparency International’s recent Global Corruption Barometer
survey, over half of all respondents described the police as
‘extremely corrupt’. This level of dissatisfaction is perhaps
less surprising when considered in light of Ukraine’s miserable
performance in TI’s 2012 Corruption Perceptions Index, where it was
ranked a shocking 144th
out of 176 countries – behind many of the other former Soviet
republics.
The
public protests that followed the May 18th
incident suggest that Ukrainians, along with Azerbaijanis and Turks,
may be increasingly unwilling to put up with a
political infrastructure that encourages intolerance and impunity in
place of integrity and accountability. How their respective
governments will respond to these demands remains an open question.
Celia
Davies is an expert
in freedom of expression and intern at Transparency International Ukraine.
