On July 1, 2021, the law “On Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine” initiated by President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy was adopted, according to which an indigenous people is “an autochthonous ethnic community that has formed on the territory of Ukraine, is a speaker of an original language and culture, has traditional, social, cultural or representative bodies, self-identifies as an indigenous people of Ukraine, constitutes an ethnic minority within its population and does not have its own state formation outside Ukraine.”

The law came into force on July 23, 2021, and provides for the protection of the rights of indigenous peoples and special mechanisms for them to work with the state.

After the occupation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a resolution to guarantee the rights of the Crimean Tatar people in the Ukrainian state. In this statement, the Crimean Tatars were recognized as an indigenous people of Ukraine, but the adoption of the law enshrined this status at the legal level, which was another step towards the de-occupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied Crimean peninsula.

Representatives of indigenous peoples of Ukraine have the collective and individual right to full enjoyment of all fundamental human rights and freedoms as defined in the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, international treaties ratified by the Verkhovna Rada, as well as the Constitution and laws of Ukraine.

The state guarantees indigenous peoples protection from actions that may be aimed at depriving them of signs of ethnicity and integrity as an original people, depriving them of cultural property, eviction or forced displacement from places of compact residence, forced assimilation or forced integration, encouraging or inciting racial, ethnic or religious hatred against them.

Indigenous peoples in our country are Crimean Tatars, Karaites and Krymchaks. The concepts of indigenous peoples and national minorities should not be equated, as the latter have ethnically related states outside their countries of residence, unlike indigenous peoples. The world considers indigenous peoples to be those who live in multi-ethnic societies of independent countries and are descendants of those who inhabited these territories at the time of conquest, colonization or establishment of the current borders.

According to the UN General Assembly Declaration of 2007, no military activity may be carried out on the territory of indigenous peoples without their consent or request, and Article 7 states that “indigenous peoples have the collective right to live in freedom, peace and security as distinct peoples and shall not be subjected to any act of genocide or violence.”

Ukraine will do everything necessary to comply with international and national law – and for this purpose, Crimea will certainly be liberated from the occupiers!