HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE ACTIVITY OF THE UKRAINIAN POLICE – 2012 Association of Ukrainian Human Rights Monitors on Law-enforcement Association of Ukrainian Human Rights Monitors on Law-enforcement (Association UMDPL) HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE ACTIVITY OF THE UKRAINIAN POLICE – 2012 This Report was created with financial support by NED (National Endowment for Democracy, USA). National Endowment for Democracy Supporting freedom around the world The publications expresses exclusively the views of the authors and cannot be identified with the official stance of NED. General edition: Batchaev V.K., Pyvovarov V.S. Group of authors: Batchaev V.K., Gryban P.V., Telichkin I.A., Tsapok M.O., Chuprov V.V., Shvets, S.P., Shvets U.S. CONTENT From compilers .......................................................................................... 4 Chuprov V.V. Observance of the right to life .................................................................... 8 Chuprov V.V Observance of the right to freedom and personal inviolability ..................20 Shvets, S.P. Observance of the right to privacy .............................................................39 Shvets, S.P. Observance of right to property ................................................................63 Telichkin I.A. Rights of internal affairs workers. Gender equality in the activity of MIA. General situation with observance of discipline and rule of law in internal affairs agencies ................................................87 Shvets, S.P. Observance of rights of vulnerable groups ................................................99 Tsapok M.O. Freedom of peaceful assembly ................................................................120 Batchaev V.K. Corruption in law enforcement agencies .................................................138 Batchaev V.K. Observance of foreigners’ rights .............................................................155 Shvets U.S. Access to public information ...................................................................172 Batchaev V.K. Illegal violence and cruel treatment ........................................................187 3 FROM COMPILERS All Ukrainian NGO «Association of Ukrainian Human Rights Monitors on Law Enforcement (Association UMDPL) presents the next report «Human Rights in the activity of the Ukrainian police – 2012», which is dedicated to the study and analysis of one of the most dangerous problems for the Ukraini- an society – insecurity of citizens from violation of their rights and freedoms by the Internal Affairs bodies. Such collections that are also reports about the results of work of the Association on monitoring activity of the Ukrainian police have been published annually since 2008 and always evoke a great interest among the wide audience of readers – from human rights defenders and journalists to employees of law enforcement bodies. Each section of the report is a competent point of view from the per- spective of the law to a certain problem in relationships between law enforce- ment authorities and citizens, opinion, which is based on the analysis of regulations of the normative-legal acts, numbers of official statistics, reports in mass media and the Association members and volunteers’ own experience received during the monitoring campaigns «Police under control». The leading experts of our organization contributed to work of compi- lation of this report, they used and analyzed various directions of activities of the bodies of Internal Affairs taking into consideration two main criteria such as objectivity and the dominance of human rights and freedoms over any other interests of the law enforcement agencies and authorities. Unfor- tunately, this approach is often regarded by some leaders of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as an attempt to discredit the work of the Ukrainian police and impair the image of its employees. Which is not. Considering the activ- ity of law enforcement agencies extremely important for the society and the state and with respect to law enforcement bodies, who perform their duties honestly and conscientiously, we reserve the right to pursue a frank conver- sation about the problems in the activity of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as the police institution does not venture to start this conversation. Nowadays police subdivisions connected with public relations, despite the name, prac- tically lost the link with the community and avoiding sensitive topics have focused exclusively on the dissemination of information about the successes 4 and achievements of law enforcement officers. It is a wrong way, because a thorough and competent criticism from the public has always been and is a powerful tool to ensure the observance of human rights in activity of the police. The most peaceful and balanced attitude to the criticism by the heads of the Ministry of Internal Affairs can testify the sincerity of their intentions to reform the law enforcement system according to the interests of the society. Unfortunately, the year 2012 did not give any grounds to declare a significant improvement in the situation of human rights in the police. The whole range of traditional for Internal Affairs bodies violations was observed. According to Association UMDPL 22 people died in Ukraine in 2012, society associates their deaths with questionable from the point of the law action or inaction of law enforcement bodies – «black list» of those deaths is in this collection. Unlawful police’s violence continues to exist in Ukraine as a system, and is even an ordinary phenomenon – ordinary citizens perceive it with disgust and indignation, however, with some exceptions, the facts of police brutality does not lead to active forms of public protest. Only through the Internet public information about over 60 of the most resonance incidents of tortures and beatings of citizens by the police was proclaimed. Some of them, which shocked the society by their extraordinary brutality are mentioned in this report. Violence by law enforcement officials very often remains unpun- ished and this was supported by frank passivity of the Prosecutor’s office and the resistance of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to implement a mechanism of the public investigation of cases of cruelty from the side of the law enforce- ment personnel in Ukraine. In 2012 there was observed an increased activity of the society in a public expressing of disagreement with this or that actions of the authorities in the form of conducting peaceful assemblies, the number of which, in com- parison with the previous years, grew by more than one and a half. Despite the fact that the protection of public order during the meetings should be fol- lowed with priority of strict observance of human rights, the police resorted to limitation of the right to peaceful protest, and in some cases staff acted against protesters violently and not adequately to the situation. 5 Violation of right to liberty and security, right to ownership or right to privacy was combined with violations of rights and freedoms of the individual groups of citizens, primarily drug dependant people in relation to whom the overt discrimination by law enforcement agencies was observed. Analysis of statistic data shows clearly that in Ukraine the fight against drug trafficking is not a criminal prosecution of individuals who receive profit from the produc- tion and organizing channels of distributing drugs, but the persecution of consumers who because of their addiction are sick people. Carrying out EURO 2012 in Ukraine and implementing progressive changes to immigration law at the end of 2011 has expectedly led to the reduction of pressure on foreigners and people without citizenship - the num- ber of the immigrants deported by the police has decreased by more than 4 times, almost 1.5 times fewer foreigners were brought to administrative responsibility for violation of rules of staying in Ukraine. However, such lib- eralization of law enforcement officers in respect to immigrants in no way led to the aggravation of migration, crime or the sanitary-epidemiological situation in Ukraine – the dangers which the Ministry of Internal Affairs regu- larly intimidated citizens by, justifying the need to undertake thorough and strict measures against immigrants. Even when the increase in the number of foreigners who visited Ukraine during 9 months of 2012 was more than a million, the number of crimes fell by four percent, and the number of illegal immigrants returned to Ukraine from the EU for implementation of provisions of the agreement on readmission has decreased almost twofold. Newly formed State Migration Service of Ukraine did not meet the ex- pectations of society, and because of the long process of its development in the regions in 2012 could not begin active phase of working. Service is gradu- ally but steadily getting scandalous fame of the Soviet «ОVIR», soaked with extortion, false pride, disrespect to the visitors, focusing on protection of the departmental and commercial interests at the expense of the rights and legit- imate interests of citizens. The best proof to this assertion is over profitable activity of notorious «enterprise-sucker» subsidiary «Document» created in State Migration Service with the help of which funds from the citizens are required by imposing a kind of voluntary additional services on registration of various documents in all regions of Ukraine. 6 From compilers In the context of relations of law enforcement bodies to immigrants who are seeking for protection