All-Ukrainian campaign against torture begins

Press announcement for immediate release
“All must fall under the operation of the law”
Cicero

Dear fellow citizens!
We live in a country where torture is an everyday phenomenon. No one will be surprised by this news. And only occasionally do we hear a reaction of protest against this shameful phenomenon in the form of statements of public condemnation, and from the authorities—promises to eradicate this evil, only when cases of torture in the dungeons of the offices of torturers in police uniforms, extraordinary in their cruelty and terrifying in their blatant cynicism, once again appear in the information space.
Society has already become accustomed to typical and everyday cases of torture in the police, and journalists are interested only in exclusive, audacious, sensational cases of abuse of people. But every fact of torture and humiliation of human dignity, beatings, and abuse in the police is a crime provided for by criminal law under qualifying features—torture, abuse of power, or official authority.
It cannot be said that these norms of the law are not applied at all, but cases of criminal punishment for torturers in uniform are so isolated that they are completely crushed in the numerous practices of human suffering, forced testimonies against oneself, the punishment of the innocent, and broken human destinies.
The just punishment of those guilty under the signs of torture is a rare sprout of justice, extremely useful for forming public consciousness in society, which corresponds to the tasks of criminal proceedings, where everyone who has committed a crime must be held accountable and no innocent person should be punished.
At the same time, many know how difficult it is to achieve the initiation of a criminal case on the fact of torture, and it is even harder to wait for a fair decision in court, because a corrupt structure of “cronyism” and “telephone law” stands in the way, and as the people say, “a raven will not peck out a raven’s eye.”
We, the NGO “Public Support”, the all-Ukrainian NGO “Centre for Human Rights ‘Freedom’”, and the NGO “Movement ‘Public Encouragement’”, continuing the achievements reached by the global and domestic community, aimed at changing inherited stereotypes in people’s consciousness about the permissibility and impunity of those in power, are beginning an all-Ukrainian campaign against torture, which aims to achieve certain goals—for every case of torture committed by representatives of the authorities, there must be an adequate reaction of the state in the form of criminal prosecution of those involved in the torture. We will facilitate the spread of the practice of initiating criminal cases on the fact of torture.
To achieve our goals, we intend to organize an indefinite picket near the building of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine with the aim of drawing public attention to the problem of torture in general and to specific individual cases of human rights violations in particular.
We will demand from the President of Ukraine, as the guarantor of the Constitution, to initiate the creation of an appropriate commission under the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, which will deal with the problem of torture, collect information about the facts of torture, and control the quality of the verification of data for the taking of appropriate measures of prosecutorial response for each case of torture.
The picketing will be carried out overwhelmingly by the efforts of the relatives and loved ones, and the people themselves against whom torture was used, who have impeccable evidence of the use of torture and who were not heard by civil servants, trying to defend their right to protection from torture and demanding that the authorities take measures in accordance with Art. 94–97 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine, that is, in cases where a criminal case on the fact of committing a crime was not initiated.
Thus, there will be no unnecessary people in the planned event who would picket for a reward; instead, only ideologically interested people will participate in the action—at least those ready to fight for the situation with the use of torture in government offices in Ukraine to change for the better.
The action will continue until positive progress in procedural form, in the form of an adequate state response, occurs regarding every fact of torture presented by the picketers.
Every case of torture will be subjected to detailed analysis and study by our lawyers. And only after it is reliably clarified that the fact of torture took place will the information be disseminated through mass media, as well as on the Internet, and will also be brought to the attention of deputies and civil servants of all levels in the form of collective appeals, as well as other information messages such as: brochures, leaflets, which will be distributed on the streets of the city.
Leading human rights organizations and individual lawyers, human rights defenders, journalists, and scientists pay great attention to the problem of torture and exert efforts both to protect human rights violated as a result of torture, and work in the direction of eradicating the flawed practice of abusing people as a phenomenon.
But individual and isolated victories and achievements in the field of human rights protection, scientific research, projects, and concepts cannot be an effective recipe for the destruction of torture as a phenomenon without a powerful wave of public unity and a common strategy of action.
We invite all non-governmental organizations and individual citizens who wish to contribute to the eradication of torture as a shameful phenomenon to join the wave of public concern.
To join the all-Ukrainian public movement against torture, it is not necessary to personally participate in the picketing; You can post information on an information resource known to you, or provide legal assistance to victims of torture, or write an article about cases of torture known to you, or appeal to government officials regarding torture in the police, or even put your signature under a collective appeal, or simply tell your friends or acquaintances that a wave of an indefinite campaign against torture has reached Ukraine. You will make your contribution to a generally useful and necessary cause.
If you have evidence of the use of torture and wish to join the indefinite picketing near the building of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine, you must provide evidentiary material to our lawyers for your case to be included in the general complex of measures against torture.

Information phone numbers:

Head of the all-Ukrainian NGO “Centre for Human Rights ‘Freedom’” Bohdan Khmelnytskyi: 0672177776,
lawyer Viktor Kolbantsev: 0676564962, 0935869117,
Tamara Rafalska: 0638095393.