Yury Shershen reports that at virtually the same time the Kharkiv and Kharkiv regional prosecutors have reported sentences handed down on police officers allegedly guilty of crimes. He notes however that the crimes they have been convicted of are those which take place on a day-to-day basis in the police

17-year-old Oleksandr Yefymenko from Novomoskovsk (Dnipropetrovsk oblast) was questioned without his parents or a lawyer present. He confessed to murdering a 13-year-old friend, but has now formally retracted this confession, saying it was given under police pressure

Dmitry Pozdeev’s brief life ended on September 29, two days after being taken into police custody. He had been taking part in “investigative activities” when he died supposedly of an acute heart disorder

On Sunday Sept. 29, at around 16.00, Dmitry Pozdeev, a 19-year-old from Dnipropetrovsk died either at the Kommunarsky District Police Station or shortly after leaving it.

Yevhen Krapyvin, activist for the Association of Ukrainian Human Rights Monitors on Law Enforcement was assaulted on 24 September and there are serious grounds for believing that a police officer in civilian clothes may have been responsible

The preliminary hearing was held on Thursday in the trial of three men, two of them police officers, charged over the brutal rape of Iryna Krashkova from Vradiyivka who was left for dead after the attack

Civic organizations are demanding measures to enable easy identification of individual police officers. This is vital, they believe, in order to combat police impunity in breaking the law and infringing their rights

The Interior Ministry Special Force Berkut was mainly created to fight dangerous criminals. In fact, however, its main task is increasingly becoming what is euphemistically referred to as protecting public order at protests.

The new draft Law on the Prosecutor’s Office proposed by the President’s Administration has met with scepticism from representatives of human rights organizations

The three men arrested in connection with the violent rape and beating in Vradiyivka of 29-year-old Iryna Krashkova are now facing charges of attempted murder.

If assaulted Road Control journalist Oleh Bogdanov’s wife previously wanted her husband to stop, she now believes there can be no giving in to violent intimidation

The lawyers of Iryna Krashkova, the young woman from Vradiyivka in the Mykolaiv oblast brutally raped and left for dead, believe that the case should be reclassified as attempted murder.

Events in Vradiyivka, the district centre of the Mykolaiv oblast with a population of 8 thousand have stirred up the entire country. On 26 June two officers of the local police station – Lieutenant Dmytro Polishchuk and Capitan Yevhen Dryzhak – dragged a 29-year-old woman, Iryna Krashkova, who was returning from a discotheque, into a taxi, took her to a forest where they raped and savagely beat her, leaving her unconscious

The Mykolaiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office has reported that a second police officer has had his status changed from witness to suspect with regard to the gang rape of a young woman from Vradiyivka

According to reports on Monday evening more than a thousand residents of Vradiyivka stormed the local police station, angered over the rape of a young woman apparently with the participation of police officers

Donetsk analysts and human rights workers concur in their view that the police are not coping with their law-defending function and are to blame for their bad image

Oleksy Svyetikov reports that the city of Severodonetsk unlike other cities in the Luhansk oblast is suspiciously free of crime - if one believes the police statistics. This, however, would be unwise

On the eve of the third anniversary of Ihor Indylo’s death in police custody, the Prosecutor has again succeeded in blocking proper examination into the young student’s death

The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union has announced that the reports from its representative on the Public Council attached to the Interior Ministry force it to conclude that there is no interest within the Public Council in resolving problems related to human rights

"Beatings and torture continue unabated in the Ukraine in spite of the new Criminal Procedure Code adopted by the government late last year. No concrete steps have been taken to set up an independent police accountability mechanism."