Oral presentation of the 22^nd OHCHR report on the HR situation in Ukraine

Intervention by the Permanent Representative of Ukraine,

Ambassador H.E. Mr. Yurii Klymenko

Geneva, July 3, 2018

Mr. President,

I thank Deputy High Commissioner for her presentation and update.

We are grateful to the Monitoring Mission for its hard work, collecting huge amount of data through interviews, site visits, meetings, monitoring, documents etc.

For us, therefore, it is hardly understandable, why, having all this information, Mission continues to call the situation on the ground “armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine”. Would it be there any conflict possible without direct involvement of Russia, without its financial and technical support to illegal armed groups, without Russian arms, ammunition, without Russian soldiers, “reportedly” on their leave, but surprisingly fully armed with weapons and ammunitions found on the Ukrainian territory?

I wish to remind that exactly with these arms, the combined Russian armed and Russia-led forces attacked MH17 four years ago, taking nearly 300 innocent lives; unleashed deadly barrages of rocket fire on Ukrainian cities; shot dead Ukrainian servicemen in the so called “green corridor” near Ilovaisk.

Last June, Ukraine submitted its Memorial to the International Court of Justice documenting serious violations of international law by the Russian Federation.  The Memorial, accompanied by voluminous evidence, establishes that the Russian Federation has violated the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism and CERD. 

Last May, reporting within the UPR third circle, the Russian Federation pretended to have eradicated racial discrimination, but the reality is quite opposite.  In the illegally occupied Crimea, Russia maintains a policy of racial discrimination and cultural erasure directed against those ethnic communities that dared to oppose its purported annexation. Russia has trampled on the political, civil, and cultural rights of these communities, including through the ban on the Crimean Tatar Mejlis; kidnapping and murdering Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian activists; banning cultural gatherings and suppressing media outlets; restricting opportunities for children to be educated in their native languages. Now, the atmosphere of fear in Crimea prevails.

In April 2017, the ICJ, in the case Ukraine vs. Russia, issued provisional measures, ordering the Russian Federation to refrain from imposing restrictions on the ability of the Crimean Tatar community to conserve its representative institutions, including the Mejlis, to ensure the availability of education in the Ukrainian language, and not to aggravate the dispute before the Court. Today the Order continues to be totally ignored.

The issue of access to Crimea for the HRMMU as well as for other international monitoring mechanisms remains acute on the agenda. We are grateful that the High Commissioner continues to pay attention to this problem, as he informed us in his global update. 

We also expect the High Commissioner and his Office to take a decisive action aimed at full implementation of UNGA resolutions 71/205 and 72/190, and we expect the HRMMU to prepare the comprehensive and objective thematic report on Crimea, without giving up on its efforts to get and analyse data collected directly on the ground.

We hope this report will pay due attention to the Ukrainian citizens illegally arrested in occupied Crimea and transferred to the Russian territory where they are subjected to ill-treatment and torture, and denied their rights to a fair trial.

One of them, filmmaker Oleh Sentsov, has been on hunger strike since 14 May, demanding to release all Ukrainian political prisoners. His state of health is in serious danger. However, last month the Ukrainian Ombudsperson Lyudmyla Denisova, despite the clear assurances of President Putin, was denied access to Ukrainian citizen.

It is important that the case of Oleh Sentsov is reflected in the 22^nd Quarterly Report.

The Ukrainian side thanks the High Commissioner and his Office for the prompt feedback to the appeal of the Foreign Minister of Ukraine regarding the Ukrainian political prisoners of the Kremlin regime. We fully support the idea to involve relevant HRC Special Procedures and to use other appropriate channels to request urgent medical attention for Oleh Sentsov and Pavlo Hryb in the Russian Federation and Volodymyr Balukh and Uzeir Abdullaiiev in the occupied Crimea.  

Time counts on days if not on hours.

That is why, it is so important, as High Commissioner Zeid has recently highlighted, to do more, to speak louder, and to work harder. 

I thank you.