Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the Council of Europe Dmytro Kuleba has called on the OSCE and the Council of Europe to jointly take measures to stop gross human rights violations committed by Russia in the illegally occupied Crimea and Donbas.
Speaking at a meeting of the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers on March 15 in response to a presentation by Florian Raunig, the head of the Austrian Foreign Ministry’s task force for the 2017 Austrian OSCE chairmanship, Kuleba said that Ukraine suggests that the OSCE and the Council of Europe together explore the ways and modalities of their involvement in the implementation of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 71/205 on the situation of human rights in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol (Ukraine), the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to the Council of Europe said in a report.
The Ukrainian delegates also said that one of the tasks of the joint efforts of the Council of Europe and the OSCE should be measures to ensure safe and unhindered access to Crimea for institutional regional and international mechanisms for monitoring how human rights are observed there. Now Russia is blocking such access, the report says.
Commenting on the meeting of the Committee of Ministers, Kuleba said: “One of the issues for both institutions is how to ensure safe and unfettered access to Crimea by established regional and international human rights monitoring mechanisms to enable them to carry out their mandate.”
