Ombudsperson’s Office comments on recent evidence about secret SBU detention places

Head of the Secretariat of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Bohdan Kryklyvenko confirms that there is a problem with secret detentions in Ukraine, but the Secretariat representatives did not find prisoners during the visits.

He said this on the air of Hromadske Radio, commenting on today’s Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch report about secret detention places of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) that were revealed after releasing of 13 people.

According to him, 16 people from the Amnesty International report are those who were at an undisclosed location in April-May 2016.

“The problem really exists. There is information about these detentions, disappearances, holding captives by the Security Service of Ukraine in the undesignated places for a long time. Even on the basis of the facts contained in the report and the claim to the Military Prosecutor, we can see that most of the stories are related to 2014. However, of course, these disappearances happened in 2015 too. Commissioner for Human Rights has taken steps to initiate physical search for these people. There have been several visits to SBU office in Kharkiv region, in Kramatorsk. However, at the time of our visits, which were without warning, people were not found,’’ Kryklyvenko says.

According to him, there are photos of basements, rooms, cells on the Commissioner’s website, where people had been held, as reported by human rights activists and relatives of detainees.

“We have studied these issues in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN monitoring mission that works in Ukraine. We have interviewed colleagues concerning human search techniques in other countries,’’ Kryklyvenko notes.

He added that there were no evidences of non-admission of the Commissioner’s employees to objects, except for they could have waited for half an hour or for an hour. The Ombudsperson sent official requests to the law enforcement authorities, but received the answer that the information was not confirmed and people from the request were not listed in their database.

As reported, 13 people were released from secret SBU prison according to the report by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch published on 29 August. The report also provided testimonies of some of these people.