By Aslan Abashidze
GENEVA, Jun 8 2015 (IPS)

The “U.N. Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine”, which was referred to in an Inter Press Service (IPS) article of Jun. 2, does not, in my view, reflect many salient points.

How the lawful Government of Ukraine was overthrown is now well known. The new Kiev regime immediately announced the prohibition of the Russian language in the eastern regions of the country, inhabited mostly by the Russian speaking population.Though more than 6,500 people have died and millions displaced, no one clarifies why the numbers are growing. No one admits that these regions face a humanitarian catastrophe.

As the U.N. report confirms, those who committed numerous murders on Maidan Square and in Odessa have not been prosecuted.

Combat aircraft of the Ukrainian Air Force, armed with a full complement of missiles, bombed the centre of Donetsk in broad daylight. These events forced the creation of militia groups to defend their interests and territory.

That is how the military confrontation between the new regime in Kiev and eastern regions of Ukraine was created – thus causing 6,500 deaths, and over a million Ukrainian refugees now living inside Russia.

The fulfillment of all provisions of the Minsk agreements (ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons, delivery of aid to the needy, local elections, formation of local authorities, constitutional reforms, etc.) signed by President Petro Poroshenko would no doubt preserve the territorial integrity of the Donetsk People’s Republic (Donetsk) and Luhansk People’s Republic (Luhansk) regions by obtaining acceptable status within the Ukrainian State.

Instead, what are we facing in fact?

The shelling of civilian areas in the eastern regions continues unabated. The observers of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) report violations of the Minsk agreements on the side of Kiev. They probably cannot witness the Ukrainian Military incursions into East Ukraine which undoubtedly spark retaliation.

Civilians in Donetsk, including children, are dying. Various military units wearing fascist symbols act independent of the Kiev authorities, claiming they do not have to abide by Minsk Agreements.

Against this background, Poroshenko publicly states that his goal is to reclaim all areas by military force. To achieve that objective, Poroshenko mobilises the military, equips armies and recruits Private Security Companies from the U.S. and NATO Member States as well as others such as Georgia. Also, he continuously requests aid from Western countries — not only billions of dollars, but also heavy military equipment, including lethal weapons.

What for? To make peace or wage war?

Recently, the Ukraine Parliament – on the pretext of “anti-terrorist operations” – adopted an Act on the non-respect of human rights in Donetsk and Luhansk. But no one, including the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), reminded the Ukrainian authorities that it is a violation of Article 4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In doing so, the Ukrainian authorities ignored the basic human right of the right to life.

It is also required that before passing such drastic laws, the country should declare a state of emergency, and clarify the need and duration of such a regime.

To declare a state of emergency, the Kiev authorities have to first recognise that an internal armed conflict exists in their territory, and secondly, they have to adhere to Article 3 that is common to four Geneva Conventions for the Protection of Victims of War of 1949 and Protocol II Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 1977.

In such a scenario, Kiev may not have access to loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others, and it would not ethical to keep draconian restrictions of a socio-economic nature at the expense of the poor segment of the population while doing nothing against the high-level of corruption in government sectors.

Furthermore, the Kiev authorities have arbitrarily cancelled the benefits of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster victims, as well as child allowances. The U.N. human rights laws prohibit such retrogressive measures that worsen the situation of vulnerable groups.

Blatantly ignoring its social and economic obligations, the Kiev authorities have stopped supplying most needed medications; stopped paying pensions and benefits to people in those regions; and have blocked all food and essential items supply routes to these beleaguered regions.

What is also not acknowledged is the fact that since the beginning of this disaster, the Russian Federation has voluntarily sent 29 convoys of humanitarian aid to these regions, and that Russia provided natural gas after Kiev cut gas supplies to these regions in the height of the winter.

On Jun. 4, Poroshenko told the Parliament they will withdraw the economic blockade against Donetsk and Luhansk only if these regions came under their total control.

To achieve this, the Kiev authorities declared a total mobilisation of reservists and strengthened the bombing of the territory by large-scale artillery shells.

The selective approach of human rights organisations in relation to certain events raises concerns. Though more than 6,500 people have died and millions displaced, no one clarifies why the numbers are growing. No one admits that these regions face a humanitarian catastrophe.

You may ask: What else can we do “to stop armed activities in the eastern part of Ukraine”, even though it is the paramount condition spelled out in the Minsk agreements signed by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France, and supported by the U.S.?

First, of course, is to ensure that the Ukrainian authorities unreservedly honour the ceasefire. Secondly, if Kiev does not control certain military groups in territories under its control, then they should be disarmed by the OSCE peacekeepers.

Unfortunately, the structures of international organisations, including U.N. human rights structures, are subject to political influence from the United States and its NATO allies, which has led to a sharp decline in credibility of these establishments.

As we know, the U.S. continues its attempts to control world affairs – including world football. If this trend continues, the principles and norms of international law enshrined in the U.N. Charter will cease to operate – paving the way for military commanders to solve world problems. Any child understands that it would lead to the death of our civilisation.

The U.N. Charter states that “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.”

There is no dispute in the world that cannot be resolved by peaceful negotiations. Figuratively speaking, we live in an “armed peace”, and in conditions of increasing threats and challenges.

What we need is the political will of world leaders to decide what kind of a world we want to live in – and for generations to come.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

The chairman of a Tashkent polling station opens a curtain to a voting booth during the Uzbek presidential election of December 2007. Uzbekistan’s Dec. 21 parliamentary elections feature only four staunchly pro-regime parties to fill the 150-seat lower house, or the Legislative Chamber. No opposition parties are permitted to legally exist in Uzbekistan, and independent candidates are barred from standing. Credit: OSCE

By Joanna Lillis
TASHKENT, Dec 19 2014 (EurasiaNet)

Uzbekistan’s parliamentary elections on Dec. 21 will offer voters a choice, but no hope for change.

Only four staunchly pro-regime parties – the Liberal Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, as well as the National Revival and the Justice parties – can field candidates for the elections to fill the 150-seat lower house, or the Legislative Chamber.“People have gotten used to all these elections as something staged, and they don’t really care what the outcome will be, because most people think it will all be the way the authorities want it to be." -- A Tashkent-based businessman

They will be joined by representatives of the Ecological Movement of Uzbekistan, which has a “green” quota of 15 seats reserved under electoral law.

No opposition parties are permitted to legally exist in Uzbekistan, and independent candidates are barred from standing.

“The state of political freedoms [in Uzbekistan] is non-existent,” Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, told EurasiaNet.org. “Genuinely independent voices have not been allowed to register and participate in this election, as in all previous ones.”

HRW and other watchdog groups routinely rank Uzbekistan as among the most repressive states on earth. That reputation is not stopping strongman President Islam Karimov from touting this election as evidence that Uzbekistan – which he has led for over two decades, brooking no opposition to his iron rule – is on the path to democracy.

Uzbekistan is “building an independent democratic state” and “creating a civil society” that prioritises “human interests, rights, and freedoms and the supremacy of the law,” he claimed in his Constitution Day speech earlier in December.

Critics say Karimov is merely attempting to add a democratic veneer to a dictatorial system. Thousands of political prisoners are languishing in jail, the media is muzzled, and most civil society activists are “either in prison or in exile,” said Nadejda Atayeva, a France-based human rights campaigner exiled from Uzbekistan.

“The Uzbek government is doing all it can to portray this election as legitimate, without actually making it legitimate – without making the election free and fair,” Swerdlow says, adding that Tashkent is harnessing the vote “as an act of consolidation and public mobilisation around the regime.”

Observers expect a high turnout. “Uzbekistan has never had free and fair elections, but the government will ensure that the turnout is sufficiently high,” Alexander Melikishvili, a Washington-based analyst at the IHS Country Risk think-tank, told EurasiaNet.org.

“The government will organise voting drives among public sector employees, and local administrations will compel people to vote through the community (mahalla) councils.”

Voters in Uzbekistan readily acknowledge that mahallas – state-sponsored residents’ councils that control local affairs – rely on coercive measures to get out the vote.

“Mahalla committees will be going round the houses asking people to go to vote,” one Tashkent-based businessman told EurasiaNet.org on condition of anonymity. “That’s exactly what happened last time there were parliamentary elections.”

The public will dutifully turn up at polling booths to avoid reprisals, he added, but will cast their votes without enthusiasm. “People have gotten used to all these elections as something staged, and they don’t really care what the outcome will be, because most people think it will all be the way the authorities want it to be,” he said.

In practical terms, the parliamentary elections mean little for day-to-day affairs in Uzbekistan. As David Dalton, an Uzbekistan analyst at the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit, points out, “Voting to parliament is heavily controlled, and the real levers of power are anyway located elsewhere.”

International observers will be in Uzbekistan on election day, but the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, or ODIHR, the election-monitoring arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, will field only a limited mission, partly due to what it describes as “the limited nature of the competition” in the election.

ODIHR has never deemed conditions conducive to sending a full observation mission to Uzbekistan, or judged an election in the Central Asian nation to be free and fair.

Meanwhile, Karimov has been on what Swerdlow describes as a “media blitz” in an attempt to legitimise “an electoral process that’s genuine in form, but not in substance.”

That may be designed to help bolster the legitimacy of another, far more important vote next year: a presidential election due in the spring, in which Karimov has not stated if he will stand, although he has hinted he will.

Editor’s note:  Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Most migrant children within the European Union are from member countries like Romania and Hungary, as well as from Turkey. Credit: Daan Bauwens/IPS

By Sabine Clappaert
BRUSSELS, Apr 2 2013 (IPS)

Twenty-two-year-old Dario (not his real name) came to Belgium from Brazil in 2005. Just a teenager at the time, he told IPS he “came to escape the economic, social and political conditions in Brazil and to learn another language”.

“In the beginning it was hard. Not speaking the language prevented me from doing certain jobs and there was also the risk of getting sick because I have no health insurance.”

Luckily, he says, the large Brazilian community in Brussels welcomed him with open arms.

“Of course one also suffers from the financial and moral exploitation of certain people who take advantage, but I don’t complain. Life is a sequence of good and bad experiences; it is part of the risk I took to better my life.”

The promise of a better future remains the principle reason why scores of children – some as young as three years, others as old as seventeen – flock to Europe, even though there is no guarantee that what they find here will be worth the trip.

While it is estimated that there are between 1.6 and 3.8 million irregular migrants in the European Union, there are no reliable figures on the percentage that are children.

Hard data is almost impossible to pin down since these children represent a multifaceted and diverse group, experts say. Most hail from other European countries like Turkey, Hungary and Romania, but a large number also come from Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Some enter the EU independently, some come with families, or were born to parents without legal status in a particular country.

Motives for migration also vary, and include family reunification, protection from persecution, or better living conditions, education and economic opportunities. A large number of these children, mostly those from Hungary and Romania, are also victims of trafficking.

Last year the UK police, with the help of Romanian authorities, rolled up a complex trafficking network run from Romania, which was using children to rake in hundreds of thousands of pounds through street crime and benefit fraud.

In a series of dawn raids codenamed “Operation Norman” officers found 103 migrant children crammed into just 16 addresses in London.

The operation took place against the backdrop of a steady rise in the number of children arriving unaccompanied in Europe, risking detention. Although some manage to enter state welfare systems, others end up living in hiding.

The financial crisis has intensified the situation, especially in EU border countries like Greece.

“Despite the European Commission’s efforts to promote harmonised regulations, the normative framework in the EU27 for the protection of undocumented migrant children is still quite diverse,” Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, special representative and coordinator for combatting trafficking in human beings at the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), told IPS.

“The implementation of national legislation is even more fragmented. Therefore, unfortunately, a common and effective child protection system does not exist at the EU level.”

Organisations like the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM) have raised the alarm about the need to guarantee the basic human rights of Europe’s “invisible” children.

“Undocumented children are in a position of triple vulnerability: as children above all, as migrants and because of their irregular status,” Michelle LeVoy of PICUM told IPS. Many families are simply unaware of their rights to housing, food and education, she said.

Despite numerous explicit and legally binding international and regional instruments that guarantee children access to their civil and social rights, countless barricades stand between rights on paper and rights in practice.

“In Spain, for instance, undocumented children in theory have the same access to healthcare as Spanish nationals do,” said LeVoy. But implementation of a new healthcare law in September 2012 aimed at restricting undocumented adults’ access to healthcare services also impacted their children.

In some countries only “essential” or “urgent” medical care may be free of charge for undocumented children, broadly defined terms that often lead to discretionary and unpredictable application of healthcare legislation.

Barriers around education are equally complex. While the constitutions of several countries grant everyone the right to education, red tape often keeps undocumented children out of the system.

“(P)ractical and concrete barriers, rather than direct legal discrimination, make integration (into the education system) almost impossible,” according to LeVoy. “Throughout the EU undocumented children are often prevented from enrolling in schools simply because they lack identification documents and a permanent address.

“Admission depends on the decision of directors and school administrators, and those decisions are arbitrary,” she said.

OSCE’s Giammarinaro believes that “member states should establish effective procedures based on the best interests of the child, whose actual implementation should be adequately monitored, especially in the case of unaccompanied and separated children”.

A second disturbing trend is the increasing number of reports of unaccompanied foreign minors disappearing from immigration reception centres 
and residential care, often without a trace.

A study by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights reveals that the disappearance of children from shelters and similar facilities is widespread, and that there is a high risk of these children falling victim to trafficking.

“Children and adolescents on the move are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation,” says Giammarinaro. “They can be exploited in prostitution, forced labour, organised begging and can be compelled to commit crimes. Therefore, the prevention of trafficking and the protection of undocumented children are inextricably linked.”

Experts have identified teenagers between the ages of 13 and 
18 years as a major at-risk group for trafficking in Eastern Europe. Even those children aware of the dangers of trafficking say they were nonetheless ready to migrate using insecure channels, according to recent UNICEF research in Moldova.

Idealised perceptions of a better lifestyle coupled with stories of success from people who have been abroad encourage risk-taking among disadvantaged youth, researchers say.

With unemployment hitting record-levels across the EU, stemming the tide of young people in search of a better future seems almost impossible and for many governments the only perceived solution, albeit short-term, is the expatriation of so-called “unwanted immigrants”.

In 2010, the OCSE advised that migrant, undocumented, unaccompanied, separated and trafficked children should not automatically be returned to their country of origin, or resettled or transferred to a third country, stating that migration control concerns cannot override the best interests of a child.

“In the absence of the availability of care provided by parents or members of the extended family, return to the country of origin should, in principle, not take place without advance secure and concrete arrangements of care and custodial responsibilities upon return to the country of origin.”