UN should set up hybrid tribunal in Ukraine – human rights activist

Ukraine should set up a hybrid tribunal involving international courts and investigators on the resolution of the United Nations.

Chairman of the Board of the Public Committee for Protection of Constitutional Rights and Freedoms Mykola Kozyrev said this in a commentary to the Human Rights Information Centre.

“Such decisions are made at the level of the UN General Assembly session. It is possible to set up a special tribunal for Ukraine following the example of the Tribunal for Yugoslavia,” the human rights activist said.

However, he emphasized that Ukraine still lacked the evidence base of international crimes.

“Ukraine should accumulate sufficient evidence base for the UN to be interested in it, to see the scale of the problem requiring solution. The Ukrainian state authorities have a very poor progress in doing this,” Mykola Kozyrev noted.

He recalled that the Russian Federation was actively trying to accumulate the data on war crimes committed by the Ukrainian military.

“Russia falls over itself to interview the migrants coming to the country. They have all been through the FSB filter. Moreover, the investigators are very persistent and biased in misguiding a person. I have talked to people who have passed this filter twice. At first, a person is recorded and then he or she is questioned for the second time. The migrants are asked hundreds of questions. They just ‘pump up’ a person: ‘You saw that! Say that Ukrainian army committed crimes!’ By doing this, they drag in facts, frame up cases and submit them to the international level,” the human rights activist explained.

Mykola Kozyrev is outraged by the lack of systematic work in Ukraine.

“Every migrant should be questioned. For example, I witnessed the seizure of Ukraine’s Security Service premises in Luhansk. However, the law enforcement officers have not questioned me. The video footage of seizure of the premises in the city on April 6 is available. They can take these photos, show them to Luhansk residents and ask: ‘Do you know this person?’ to subsequently initiate a criminal case against these people, but no one does that,” the human rights activist summed up.

Earlier, Head of the human rights Centre for Civil Liberties Oleksandra Matviychuk stressed that it would be appropriate to set up a special prosecutor’s office within a hybrid tribunal in Ukraine, which would be independent of national authorities and would independently investigate, collect and analyze evidence, qualify the actions and so on.

In turn, expert of the Reanimation Package of Reforms Roman Kuybida believes that the international investigators and prosecutors should be involved in the investigations into the international and corruption crimes in Ukraine as they could perform certain functions in the investigative or prosecutorial groups.