OSCE/ODIHR human rights assessment mission requested by Ukraine completes field work

WARSAW, 1 April 2014 - The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) announced today that its part of the Human Rights Assessment Mission deployed at the request of the Ukrainian authorities had completed its field work.

The mission collected information in order to assess the situation with respect to OSCE commitments and other applicable international human rights standards.

“The completion of our field work represents an important step in the work of the Human Rights Assessment Mission,” said Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, Director of ODIHR. “I’m glad that our experts generally had full access to the places and interlocutors relevant to their work. This allowed them to collect a wealth of information that will form the basis of our report.”

The mission comprised 19 experts from ODIHR, and visited a number of cities, including Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Lviv, Mikolayiv, Odessa and Simferopol, as well as the surrounding regions.

They met with representatives from national government and local authorities, from political parties and international organizations and from civil society and minority communities to gather information for the assessment of the human rights situation.

Ukraine’s authorities issued the invitation for the mission on 3 March to ODIHR and the OSCE High Commissioner for National Minorities (HCNM), and an advance team was deployed on 6 March, followed by the full mission on 18 March.

The experts from the HCNM have additional visits planned to Ukraine in connection with the mission in the coming weeks.

A report on the mission’s findings and recommendations is planned for release toward the end of April.