The Minister’s improvement of a Public Council he ignores
The Minister of Internal Affairs has informed the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union (UHHRU) of his plan to improve work with civic organizations. His letter, dated 17 June 2010 asserts that representatives of human rights organizations are systematically invited to meetings to meetings of the Ministry’s collegiate.
UHHRU which unites 29 human rights organizations has not received one such invitation and is unaware of others who have.
The Minister also asserts that work with public councils will be improved. Yet, as reported khpg.org/index.php?id=1276281635 on 11 June, the Public Council on Human Rights under the MIA was forced to publish an open letter to the Minister since all their letters asking for a meeting of the Council had been ignored. Not one meeting has been held under the new Minister.
The letter states that a number of functions and duties previously carried out by the now dismissed regional Advisers to the Minister on Human Rights will be given to non-staff highly-qualified consultant-assistants and advisors. How will these be selected and when? What process of selection is planned? When the Department for the Monitoring of Human Rights in the Work of the Police was being created, an open nation-wide competition was held, with the selection committee made up of representatives of both the police and human rights organizations. The process took around 6 months. Here nothing at all is clear and despite the words, there is nobody within the police defending human rights. And there is nothing to indicate when such people will appear.