Last Thursday Nina Karpachova, the Verkhovna Rada’s Human Rights Ombudswoman commented to journalists on the main points of the annual report The State of Human Rights and Freedoms in Ukraine, which has just been submitted to the Ukrainian parliament. She pointed out that the main violator of human rights and freedoms in Ukraine is the state or, to be more exact, its power structures. “As the human rights commissioner,” Ms. Karpachova said, “I view the judicial branch of power and law enforcement agencies as the greatest problem in these structures. One-third of all complaints to my office concerns unjust court rulings. A large number of petitions are about failure to comply with court orders. There are instances of torture and unlawful methods of investigation, too. What this country needs is rapid-reaction groups that could visit penitentiaries, because my small team cannot tackle all the problems. But this will only be possible when Ukraine joins the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention against Torture. It is also very important to change the procedure for appointing judges. Cases should be heard collectively, and judges should be appointed on a competitive basis for a certain period rather than hold their office indefinitely. We should begin all this with the Supreme Court this coming December.”
Ukrainian prisons are 20% overcrowded. There are 180 penitentiaries in Ukraine with 188,300 inmates, including 9,500 women and 3,200 minors. Ms. Karpachova condemns the practice of imprisoning people who do not present a grave danger to society, if their prison terms are less than three years. Tuberculosis alone has claimed 6,500 lives in correctional facilities and pretrial cells over the past decade. The sick should be treated only at health care establishments, not in jails. For those sentenced to life imprisonment, a differentiated system of serving their sentences should be created; this practice has already proved useful all over the world.
Today, large numbers of doctors, teachers, civil servants, and journalists are petitioning the ombudswoman for protection against political persecution for having voted for the “wrong” candidate. In the first 6 months of this year her office received 1,243 petitions of this kind.
The ombudswoman also focused on the constitutionally guaranteed right to work. There are about a million each of unemployed people and part-time workers in Ukraine today. The minimum wage (310 hryvnias) introduced on July 1 covers only 70% of the subsistence level. Moreover, unpaid wages are also on the rise, and the backlog has reached 1,300,000,000 hryvnias.
