International AIDS Day, December 1 - is not just an occasion to emphasize the living conditions and the prevalence of the AIDS epidemic in Ukraine. The necessarily is arising to ask more critical question – how do HIV-positive people feel and whether are their rights protected?

The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union is appalled by the cynical and senseless violence demonstrated during the unlawful dispersing of the peaceful protest on Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv and other acts of violence throughout the country

The violent dispersal of EuroMaidan came almost 3 years to the day that similar action was taken against the Tax Code Maidan. There are other sinister parallels, including people remanded in custody on dubious grounds in a clear attempt to warn others of likely consequences of peaceful protest..

Two journalists from the public broadcasting initiative Hromadskie.tv were set upon by a bunch of thugs while filming people brought in for a pro-government demonstration. The attack was clearly directed at the journalists, with their camera smashed and a flash drive with material removed

Volodymyr Butkevych has resigned from the Constitutional Assembly in protest at the Government’s usurping of parliament’s role with its decision to suspend preparations for the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement

President Yanukovych’s stated “applause” for those who have come out in support of European integration could profitably be translated into action to prevent the ever-increasing number of court bans on such protest

The Ukrainian Catholic University has issued a statement expressing deep concern over the announcement on Thursday that Ukraine’s government is suspending the country’s European integration process

Exactly one year since the adoption of the foreign agents law which Amnesty International says is choking independent NGOs, ruling party MPs want to equate media with foreign funding to “foreign agents”

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has issued an urgent appeal to Ukraine " to act and to unify in a practicable way toward the rule of law, and notplay for time. The clock is ticking, time is running out, and everyone in Ukraine should be aware of this."

Ukraine has lost a second case in the European Court of Human Rights this year highlighting the urgent need for legislative regulation of the right to peaceful assembly. Both cases were successfully represented in Strasbourg by Volodymyr Yavorskyy

The trials are underway of three Ukrainians, one a university professor, charged with state treason (spying for China) over information gleaned from the Internet, then set out in a textbook. Two men have been in detention since 2011 although the investigators have not established when the said spying took place, nor provided any evidence that the Chinese businessman was in fact an intelligence agent. Being Chinese is really not enough.

Two young men - Oleksy Rud and Serhiy Chychotka - have been held in custody for almost two years, Professor Volodymyr Chumakov is facing the same charges of state treason through spying for China. What Ukraine’s SBU [Security Service] believe to be incriminating evidence is all presented below. These are the excerpts from Chumakov’s textbook, largely compiled from open resources, on the subject of railguns.

News on Monday that Serhiy Vlasenko, Tymoshenko’s lawyer, had been detained proved exaggerated however the new criminal charges against him can only exacerbate fears for the fate of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement

Ukraine has been ordered to pay former prisoner Sergey Savenko 7 thousand EUR over torture and ill-treatment at the Temnivka no. 100 Prison (Kharkiv Region). Human Rights workers do not expect those guilty of the latest proven violations to face punishment

With the Deputy Prosecutor General seeking the dismissal of a Kyiv judge guilty of a number of acquittals, you might wonder if the latter had ignored conclusive evidence and set serial killers at large. Not in Ukraine where the Prosecutor regularly goes on the offensive when judges have the temerity to find the prosecution’s case unconvincing.

Over the last 5 years, despite the gravity of the problem, 5 anti-tuberculosis units have been closed. Each was supposedly closed “for repairs” but never opened again. There are fears that the unit for patients with the most severe form of the disease will also not reopen

President Vladimir Putin signed the legislation on November 3, requiring "close relatives and acquaintances" of those who commit acts of "terrorism" to pay damages -- both material and moral -- resulting from those acts

Yet another showing of the documentary film collection “Open Access” has been deliberately sabotaged, this time in Donetsk. A man spilt some stinking substance and the room had to be evacuated.

On 30 October, Remembrance Day for the Victims of Political Repression, Memorial made public a list of 70 political prisoners in Russia today

With Tymoshenko still imprisoned and EU patience wearing thin, you might have thought now was not the time to arrest another politician. Ukraine’s leaders would appear to have decided otherwise, for reasons which suggest some very strange manoeuvres