Number of missing women rising in Crimea – “Crimea SOS”
The number of people who have gone missing in temporarily occupied Crimea is increasing annually, with a growing proportion of them being women, as stated by Artem Oliinyk, an advocacy expert with the NGO “Crimea SOS,” during a side event in Geneva as part of the 58th session of the UN Human Rights Council.
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Photo credits: Ukrinform
“Crimea SOS” emphasizes that enforced disappearances constitute a gross violation of human rights and are used by the occupying administration as a means of intimidating the local population.
As the advocacy expert stressed during the event, enforced disappearances are not the only method of repression in occupied Crimea. The Kremlin punishes individuals even for listening to Ukrainian songs or for criticizing the war with threats of beatings, searches, arrests, and “filmed” public humiliation for propaganda purposes.
“These actions are justified by the fight against ‘discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,’ but in reality, the courts are simply rubber-stamping persecutions,” Oliinyk said.
He noted that since March 2022, at least 1,126 people have fallen victim to this policy, and the number continues to grow.
Oliinyk also raised the issue of religious freedom on the occupied peninsula. According to his data, religious communities in Crimea systematically face persecution from the occupying security services. Searches, arrests, imprisonment, abductions, and fabricated court trials are their reality.
He pointed out that Crimean Muslims face the most oppression. Human rights defenders have recorded 117 victims of criminal prosecution on the peninsula, where the defendants are accused of “belonging to the organization Hizb ut-Tahrir,” which is recognized as a terrorist organization in the Russian Federation, but legal in the whole territory of Ukraine, including the temporarily occupied Autonomous Republic of Crimea. In addition, 32 people have become victims of persecution for alleged involvement in the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization, 15 of whom have already been convicted.
Within the past year, human rights defenders in temporarily occupied Crimea recorded at least news six new cases of enforced disappearances: two men and four women.
