41st session of the UN Human Rights Council
Agenda item 2
General debate on High Commissioner’s oral update
Intervention by Permanent Representative of Ukraine Ambassador Yurii Klymenko
Mr President,
I thank the High Commissioner for the update.
We fully support her approaches aimed at strengthening the role of the OHCHR, improving coordination of all human rights bodies and mechanisms, enhancing national human rights institutions, maintaining the role of parliaments.
Ukraine remains determined to continue promoting and protecting human rights of all throughout its territory in the challenging environment of the Russian armed aggression and illegal occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas region.
Consistent implementation of the National Human Rights Strategy till 2020 and the respective Action Plan is well under way. Our NHRI with an A status maintains close cooperation with the OHCHR. The Ukrainian delegation in the Interparliamentary Union actively promotes resolutions in the field of human rights.
We attach particular importance to the role and work of the OHCHR, and my country has recently made a voluntary contribution to support its activities.
We also appreciate the technical support provided by the OHCHR through its field missions.
As a positive example of such activities, we note the work of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine deployed in March 2014, upon invitation of the Government, with a mandate to “monitor the human rights situation in the country, with particular attention to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine, as well as to recommend concrete follow-up actions to relevant authorities of Ukraine, the UN and the international community…”.
We regret to say that after five years of Mission’s work, despite all OHCHR recommendations, no progress has been made in making the Occupying Power comply with its obligations under international human rights law and international humanitarian law.
Against this backdrop, our delegation will table this session a draft follow-up resolution on “Cooperation with and assistance to Ukraine in the field of human rights”. We count on a broad support among delegations for the resolution, which will allow to continue Interactive Dialogues on Ukraine based on respective OHCHR reports.
We are looking forward to the High Commissioner’s new oral update on Ukraine on July 10 and take this opportunity to invite delegations to participate in the Interactive Dialogue.
I thank you.