You're reading: Council of Europe to investigate alleged rights abuses in courts, law enforcement

Courts, law enforcement seen as problem areas.

A leading European human rights official said he will come to Ukraine at the end of November to investigate numerous alleged human rights abuses in the courts and among law enforcement officers.

Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, spoke of his concerns during a two-day visit to Ukraine on Sept. 20-21.

“We will look at the system of justice in particular, the police, law enforcement, judicial system, the use of judges, the prosecution system and procedure, and then the prisons as well,” he told the Kyiv Post on the sidelines of the International Conference on Prevention of Human Rights Violations.

“And then we will look at the minorities and the discrimination. In all these areas there are problems in Ukraine. And the authorities don’t deny that,” he added.

The Council of Europe brings together European countries to promote legal standards and human rights.
The commissioner issued his previous report about Ukraine in 2007, emphasizing the country had a big problem of prisoners being tortured.

Ukrainian ombudswoman Nina Karpachova reported on Sept. 20 on the death of 28-year-old woman, who died in Kyiv’s Lukyanivsky detention center after being denied timely medical treatment.

The Amnesty International human rights watchdog also mentioned torture and ill-treatment in prisons and police custody in its 2011 report on Ukraine, as well as harassments of human rights activists, discrimination of refugees and ethnic minorities, and cases where “peaceful demonstrators were detained and subjected to violence.”

Hammarberg confirmed that he had received “quite a number” of complains of this kind from Ukraine.
“That is one reason I feel it is necessary to go and look more closely to see where the problems are and come up with the recommendations,” he said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].

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