Pressure on the Ukrainian Government Over Torture Allegations Went on for Months

What You Need To Know:

✅ Information about illegal detentions and secret prisons is not a new problem for Ukraine;
✅ The problem first surfaced two years ago when it was exposed through UN Monitoring Mission reports and relatives of those imprisoned;
✅ “The nature of such keeping indetention is exchange proceedings;”
✅ “Now we are waiting for official or any result of such investigation.”

Information about illegal detentions and secret prisons is not a new problem for Ukraine, explains Bohdan Kryklyvenko, Head of the Secretariat of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights. According to him, the problem first surfaced two years ago when it was exposed through UN Monitoring Mission reports and relatives of those imprisoned. There have been long running efforts to draw attention to the matter and pressure the Ukrainian Government into investigating and ending the practice of illegal detention.

“The nature of such keeping in detention is exchange proceedings,” says Kryvylenko, adding that “in accordance with their records, the people were kept just for the exchanges.” He says that this is the main problem in this story and when UN torture prevention sub-committees are scheduled to make a visit, many of these detainees will be released.

Apart from the UN reports, which present factual evidence of such illegal detentions, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also gathered information on such detentions. “Now we are waiting for official or any result of such investigation,”he says.
While the head of the Ukrainian Security Service has denied its involvement, and numbers of illegal detained have dropped in the last two years, Kryklyvenko says they are “very close to have some answers.”

Hromadske’s Nataliya Gumenyuk and Andriy Kulykov spoke to Bohdan Kryklyvenko, Head of the Secretariat of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights via Skype on September 4th, 2016 in Kyiv.