In May 31, 2018 the Permanent Representative of the President of Ukraine in ARC Borys Babin and the official of the Department of the International Connections of the Mission Taisia Tkachenko held a working meeting with the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment Prof. Nils Melzer. During a meeting it was discussed the state of compliance with the international commitments regarding the inadmissibility of tortures both as state – aggressor and Ukraine, concerning the persons, residing in Crimea, coming from the temporarily occupied territory also as the IDPs from the peninsula.
Borys Babin told the Special Rapporteur and the officials of the UN office about the current activity and the Mandate of the Mission in the context of Human Rights protection. The attention was paid to illegal implementation in Crimea the criminal, procedural and penitentiary rules and standards of Russia which significantly worsened the situation of persons in prisons and other who are under the constant control of the punitive bodies of the occupying authorities in Crimea. The reference was made to the massive cruel and inhuman treatment of persons staying in the overcrowded detention unit of Simferopol, where the number of persons to be detained according to the standards is 700 but actually it is two or three times increased. A particular attention of the Special Rapporteur was drawn to the absence of real possibility of the International Red Cross Committee to realize its Mandate on prisoners` aid in Crimea due to the activity of the office of the Moscow regional delegation of ICRC in Simferopol.
It was discussed the facts of massive ill – treatment of detainees by the prison authorities in the seized penitentiary unit of Kerch due to the number of “privileged” prisoners in the worst traditions of Stalin’s concentration camps. As the examples of brutality and lawlessness within the Mandate of the Special Rapporteur were forcible psychological examination of Ilmi Umerov, massive facts of detained Crimean Tatars’ activists’ beating, inhuman tortures of Renat Paralamov, obvious signs of tortures on the found bodies, kidnapped by the occupiers, beginning with Reshat Ametov.
It was pointed to the facts of psychological and physical pressure done by the Russian military men on the crew of fishing vessel 0041, who now are detained and being under the full control of Russian militaries. The attention was paid to removal of nearly all the political detainees from Crimea to the prisons in remote regions of Russia in order to make psychological pressure on the members of their families and to facilitate tortures and ill – treatment of detainees.
It was determined the real ways of the Special Rapporteur to help the victims of tortures and ill – treatment in the circumstances when the Russian Government demands the UN Special Rapporteur to visit Crimea as the “part of the territory of RF”, evidently one more time ignoring the fundamental Human Rights for the sake of unsuccessful plans of “legitimization” attempts of the Crimea annexation. The risen issues concerned the possibility to implement UN Convention against tortures and other cruel, inhuman and other degrading treatment or punishment and its measures of Human Rights` protection of the population of the temporarily occupied Crimea, including the international claims to be submitted to UN Council against the state-aggressor’s tortures.
It was recognized that during the last months the Mission did not get complains on tortures of degrading treatment from the persons crossing the check-points in the administrative boundary line with Crimea or from the persons from Crimea who served or serving their sentence in the prisons of the mainland Ukraine.