Thank you. I'm Halyna Coynash from the Kharkiv human rights group.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for allowing me to be here today. Frankly, I would have preferred to be here as a tourist. Unfortunately, I'm here with really quite serious things to say.
The hearings are taking place in a time of very great concern over human rights in Ukraine and generally where democracy is going. It is of no wonder, considering that Ukraine has now become a country with political prisoners. This is a very, very major step backwards. There is a lot of knowledge, obviously, in Canada about the situation with the political trial of Yulia Tymoshenko; the former Minister of the Interior, Yuri Lutsenko; and many others.
The charges against Lutsenko are trivial and totally absurd, to the point where.... I'm sorry. I will actually try to read because I think I'm probably going to get flustered otherwise—sorry.
Witnesses for the prosecution have actually stated in court that the alleged offences he was charged with were actually standard practice, and are still standard practice, within the ministry, and yet he has been convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. There were terribly serious infringements. Witnesses were stating in court that they had been pressured by the investigator, that the investigator had actually dictated what they should say. All of this was stated in court, and yet it was ignored.
There were huge irregularities in both the cases of Tymoshenko and of Lutsenko, and those of other people as well—Ivashchenko and some others—with why in fact they were remanded in detention anyway. The use of detention is one of the reasons for Lutsenko's oncoming case at the European Court of Human Rights. It's no accident that the court in Strassbourg has fast-tracked this particular case and has also appointed a public hearing on April 17, which is something it does not do very often. It's obviously showing how important it sees the case.
The swift and unequivocal statements from western countries, including Canada, make it clear that nobody is under any illusions about the political nature of these trials. Western democracies became implacable over the arrest of Yulia Tymoshenko. They are absolutely right not to budge; however, it would be most unwise to assume that a compromise over Tymoshenko, even if such a thing were offered, could allay other concerns.
The concerns are very great at the moment. They are not only over Tymoshenko, Lutsenko, and a few others. There are already a number of other victims of politically motivated or selective prosecution in Ukraine, and there are very many other trends that have absolutely no place in a law-based democracy.
The evidence of similar selective use of criminal prosecution and of unacceptable methods of quashing dissent has been overwhelming for a very long time. The last two years have been marred by the first questionable election since 2004—those were the local elections in October 2010—by political persecution, harassment, and other methods of pressure against not just political opponents but also civic activists, people who are in any way asserting their rights.
The Yanukovych-initiated judicial changes of 2010 have made judges—who, frankly, were never renowned in Ukraine for independence—seriously dependent and seriously controlled, in particular by the prosecutor and by the high council of judges, which has highly dubious makeup, including many members of the prosecutor general's office.
Those in power, including the local authorities, are using the law enforcement offices, the courts, the tax inspectorate, the police, and even such apparent innocuous bodies as the sanitary hygiene service as instruments of pressure or repression. The media is also being used for these purposes as well. Freedom of peaceful assembly has been consistently violated over the last two years. The courts almost always allow applications to ban meetings for basically no reason whatsoever. The Berkut riot police are used in an extremely heavy-handed manner. There is also a disturbing number of cases where, in the case of peaceful assembly, the courts have actually sentenced people, maybe to three days' imprisonment, maybe to 15 days' imprisonment. At the moment it's not 10 years, as it once was, but it is still a serious violation. They are simply exercising their right to freedom of assembly.
What is particularly worrying, I suppose, in all of this is that the courts, the prosecutor, all of them, work together. My organization, other organizations, as I'm sure my colleagues would all say—we are appealing against many of these bizarre decisions to ban demonstrations, to imprison people. They appeal them, and the appeals are simply knocked out. Nobody wants to listen at all.
Other methods are extremely worrying. For example, the use of the traffic police has become very common to stop people getting to demonstrations. That can be blockades. It can also be such methods as the police.... The traffic police simply go to a company that is providing transport and quietly tell them—or not so quietly, I have no idea; I have never been there. But it is quite clear that they are informed that if they continue, if they offer transport on that day, they can expect their licence to be removed. Or a driver will suddenly find that the police stop him and decide that he's drunk. That's obviously a serious offence, and nobody is going to check whether in fact he has any alcohol in his system at all.
There have also been a number of prosecutions against people expressing their right to protest, which fully warrant being considered political persecution as well. The protests against the draft tax code in November 2010 coincided totally with the Orange Revolution; it was the anniversary of the Orange Revolution, which doubtless particularly annoyed certain people in power. There were thousands of people on Independence Square in Kiev. The authorities didn't want to do anything too heavy-handed at the time. They gave some very token concessions, which were almost immediately cancelled. Then the riot police and the municipal authorities came in at dawn. They removed all of the protestors within minutes. I think it was something like 20 minutes.