Name: Artem Fomenko
Position: Private lawyer
Key point: Helping displaced people assert their rights
Halfway through 2016, Artem Fomenko lost count of the number of cases he’d handled for internally displaced people.
It had been less than a year after he had left his government job as a social worker to join the Ukrainian charity foundation Gorenie, where he offers free legal aid to IDPs.
While still at his government job, he started working with internally displaced persons shortly after Russian-backed forces seized control of parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
The 27-year-old had logged plenty of volunteer hours too. Helping IDPs find housing and employment was in all in a day’s work.
“Like all citizens, I helped how I could. Then I wanted to do more. I started looking for opportunities,” he said.
That’s what finally led him to work full-time at Gorenie.
Some 1.7 million IDPs are registered in Ukraine – although it is widely recognized that the figure is inflated, with scores of pensioners claiming IDP status after the Ukrainian government began withholding payments to those living outside Ukrainian-controlled areas.
Gorenie has two branches, in Pavlograd and Dnipro, some 390 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, and its proximity to Donetsk means the charity is flooded with calls for help.
The Dnipro-based lawyer receives more than 20 phone calls a day from people seeking help with problems, ranging from suspended social benefits to unfair dismissal and reinstatement of documents.
Some cases lead to lawsuits and some days stand out more than others.
Russian news
A few months into the job, Fomenko was approached by the director of a boarding school in Zaporizhzhya.
A 15-year-old girl with little more than a birth certificate had fled her home in Makiyivka, an industrial city in Donetsk Oblast, and was seeking refuge at the school.
Subjected to Russian propaganda from her family and her classmates, the teenager told Fomenko she could no longer tolerate it.
“Her mother would sit them in front of the television from six to eight every night to watch Russian news and then go to bed. She said her brain was exploding,” he said. “The neighbors hinted that they were leaving for government-controlled territory, so one night she climbed through her window, jumped in their car and left for Zaporizhzhya.”
Back then IDPs were registered only through their passports while children were registered in their parents’ IDP certificates. Fomenko’s client had neither.
There was no procedure for this kind of situation at the time either.
“Officially, there wasn’t even money to feed her. She was fed thanks to volunteers and the director, out of their own pockets,” he said.
Fomenko believes the authorities turned a blind eye to her presence while they explored various options, including emancipation from parental guardianship, to grant her the status of an IDP.
Then in late 2015 and early 2016 the Ukrainian government passed a series of changes, which included expanding its list of identification documents accepted for IDP recognition as well as departmental powers to register unaccompanied children.
Legal changes
Fomenko’s workload comes in waves.
“Even the smallest changes can cause an increase of inquiries,” he said.
There is no shortage of work.
In 2016, the government made several amendments to legislation directed at internally displaced persons.
Fomenko helped push for some of those – including the simplification of the IDP registration procedure, which no longer requires certificate renewal every six months.
Other changes, less favored by human rights groups, saw the government designate state-owned Oschadbank as the gatekeeper for social benefits and pensions. The bank was also granted further powers by the Cabinet of Ministers to suspend payments to pensioners who failed to attend regular physical identification checks.
It forms part of the government’s plan to cut down on “pension tourism” in which people living in Kremlin-controlled areas try to claim benefits from the Ukrainian state.
But Fomenko said this has led to unmanageable crowds flooding bank branches.
Human rights groups reported that a 64-year-old man on March 13 died waiting to pass physical identification in a line of 100 or so people of a Severodonest branch of Oschadbank.
Fomenko believes pensions should be distributed regardless of a person’s location.
And he says the government needs to understand many people are simply unable to cross into government-controlled territory.
“Some of them are chronically ill, some are disabled… some are looking after such people, others have small children and were simply too scared to cross,” he said. “These people, for two-and-a-half years, have been hostages of the situation.”
