July 2011 Blog Posts (12)

Over 50 civic organizations making up the partnership New Citizen have issued an appeal expressing concern over the effective sabotage by the Cabinet of Ministers of the Law on Access to Public Information.

The appeal points out that the Cabinet of Ministers was obliged to have brought its normative…

At a press conference on Monday, 11 July, Yevhen Zakharov, Co-Chair of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group stated that the search carried out by law enforcement officers wearing masks of the offices of the newspaper Glavnoye had violated three articles of the European Convention.

He said that as soon as the officers saw that this was an editorial office, they should have apologized and left, without disturbing the journalists. Instead they behaved quite differently.

He said that…

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Courts in Belarus have begun hearing cases and imposing short jail sentences and fines against some of the hundreds of people who were detained during antigovernment demonstrations in Minsk and other cities on July 6.

Rights activists say some 130 people were tried in Minsk on July 7.

Alesia Jakubouskaja of the rights group Vyasna ("Spring"), who was…

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In a speech on Tuesday to the Ukraine-EU Parliamentary Club in Strasbourg, Stefan Fule, urged Ukraine’s parliament to take the advice of international organizations into account.. "We also need to listen to trusted outside bodies with experience and useful advice to give: an example of this would be the Venice Commission in the case of the new electoral…

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The fourth session of the Meeting of the Parties to the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters took place last week in Moldova.  Official delegates and members of civic society from 43 countries gathered to discuss problems and achievements in implementing the Aarhus Convention in their…

The civic movement Stop Censorship has issued a statement urging President Yanukovych to give his attention to cases which place freedom of expression in jeopardy in Ukraine.

They point out that the situation in the information sphere has worsened radically during the period from 2010 to 2011, largely because of actions by the authorities. Examples mentioned include the use of Special…

Anna Synkova, a 20-year-old Kyiv student who made scrambled eggs on the Eternal Flame in Kyiv has apparently finally been released from the SIZO [remand unit] where she had been held since 29 March this year.  In December she and some other activists from an association called the St Luke Brotherhood made the scrambled eggs, they explained, in protest against the senseless use of natural gas (to keep the Eternal Flame burning) and the cynical disregard by the Ukrainian authorities of the…

The following Manifesto was endorsed by participants of the Fifth Forum of Ukrainian Human Rights Organizations.

We, the participants in the Fifth Forum of Ukrainian Human Rights Organizations must with concern note that the level of disregard for human rights and freedoms by the authorities in Ukraine is steadily increasing and taking on worrying signs of a deliberate policy of exerting pressure on the public to serve the interests of certain political and oligarch…

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The authoritarian countries of the former Soviet Union have built governance systems that are resistant to reform and therefore increasingly vulnerable to unpredictable crises of the sort recently seen in the Middle East and North Africa, according to a new study released by Freedom House.

Nations in…