You're reading: OSCE SMM Frisch to visit prisons in occupied areas of Donbas in September

Coordinator of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) Toni Frisch has agreed to visit prisoners in the occupied areas of Donbas in September, Verkhovna Rada First Deputy Speaker and Ukraine’s envoy to the Trilateral Contact Group’s (TCG) humanitarian subgroup Iryna Gerashchenko has said.

“At our request, the OSCE coordinator Frisch will visit the prisons in the occupied territories, but, as he said, only in early September … Ukrainian negotiators expressed disappointment that the coordinator did not find an opportunity to speed up his visit,” Gerashchenko wrote on her page in Facebook on June 28 following the results of the work on the humanitarian subgroup of TCG in Minsk on June 27.

According to her, in turn, the OSCE coordinator proposed to the subgroup to adopt a joint statement on the inadmissibility of torture in prisons.

“We insisted that the statement should fix a requirement on the ICRC’s [International Committee of the Red Cross] unhindered and guaranteed access to prisons, primarily in the occupied areas. We will sign this declaration when it fixes the requirement and the commitments to admit the ICRC to prisons in Russia, to Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia,” the representative of Ukraine said.

In addition, Gerashchenko said that Ukrainian representatives raised the issue of the release of Ukrainian hostages in Donbas and political prisoners in Russia.

“We asked the Russian representatives to immediately give an official response to our proposal to transfer 23 Russian criminals for the liberation of Ukrainians and the Russian Federation did not provide answers to our oral and written requests..,” she said, adding that the Ukrainian side demands from the OSCE coordinator formally put on the agenda of the next meeting the first issue of the release in 23×23 format – Russians on Ukrainians.