NGOs accuse Ukrainian Interior Minister of manipulating and using hate speech

Date: 26 September 2016
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Ukrainian non-governmental human rights organizations are outraged by the statements made by Interior Minister of Ukraine Arsen Avakov towards internally displaced persons. The Minister is accused of manipulating facts and figures and using hate speech.

This is said in the joint statement made by Charitable Foundation “Vostok-SOS”, the Association of Ukrainian Monitors for Observance of Human Rights in Law Enforcement Activities and the Kharkiv Institute for Social Research, available to the Human Rights Information Centre.

The authors of the statement refer to the message, posted on the Interior Ministry’s website on September 23, in which Arsen Avakov called on the Parliament to support the bill on criminal offenses.

According to the organization, in his explanation of the factors that affect the growth of crime rate in the country, Avakov presented manipulative and discriminatory thesis concerning persons who left the territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions due to the military conflict:

Nearly a million refugees-migrants have come to Kyiv from Donbas during the war years. From two to three million people create some problems across the country. It is difficult to control it in the statistics,” the press service of the Interior Ministry quotes Avakov as saying.

The human rights activists believe that using a term “refugees-migrants” by the Interior Minister in relation to residents of the east of our country, who were forced to leave their homes due to the aggression of the Russian Federation and armed conflict and became the internally displaced persons, is a sign of either poor professionalism of the Minister or his legal illiteracy, or misunderstanding of the nature of the movement and the consequences of the conflict as a whole.

According to the human rights activists, such statements made by the Minister are nothing but usage of hate speech, which creates an artificial distinction between citizens of Ukraine depending on the place of registration, and therefore is unacceptable for an official of such level.

The authors of the statement also note that Avakov openly manipulates figures. As of July 2016, the number of IDPs in Kyiv, according to the social policy department of the Kyiv City State Administration, was 138,566 persons versus “one million”, as stated by the Minister. As of September 19, 2016, the total number of IDPs in Ukraine, according to official data of the Social Policy Ministry of Ukraine, was 1.703,932 persons versus “three million” mentioned in the ministerial statement.

As for the crime rate, the human rights defenders believe that its level is really growing across the country, but the main reason for this is a socio-economic crisis that is being exacerbating, in particular, as a result of the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine. The internally displaced persons or refugees are not and cannot be the reason for that.

It is unacceptable and outrageous fact, when the interior minister, the official of such a level, uses the term ‘refugees-migrants’ referring to the inhabitants of our country who are forced to flee from war. Moreover, this phrase is horrible as these words of the Minister are in no way based on statistics. The hate speech, used by Mr. Avakov, incites hatred and ‘turns’ all IDPs into potential criminals,” Alyona Lunyova, the legal coordinator of the NGO “Vostok-SOS”, said this in a commentary to the Human Rights Information Centre.

The NGOs, the authors of the statement, demand that Interior Minister Arsen Avakov should: either to publicly provide evidence that would confirm announced by him and published on the official Interior Ministry’s website data on the internally displaced persons, or to publish the refutation of information on the relationship between the growth of crime rate in Ukraine and the increasing number of internally displaced persons who were forced to flee from their homes in Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

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