On June 23rd, 2020, the Joint Project "European Union and Council of Europe working together to support prison reform in Ukraine - SPERU” conducted an online event to present and discuss a consolidated Analysis of the CPT recommendations to Ukraine (available in Ukrainian Аналіз виконання рекомендацій).
The Council of Europe's experts analysed all the recommendations provided by the Committee since its first visit to Ukraine in 1998. During this time, the Committee has published 15 reports on Ukraine, 12 of which have been devoted in whole or partly to the Ukrainian penitentiary system.
The analysis was presented to the national stakeholders, international partners, civil society organisations in sphere of human rights protection in order to enhance general awareness and capacity to proceed with the penitentiary reform based on the CoE standards.
The event was attended by Olena Vysotska, Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine, Mykola Gnatovskyi, President of the European Committee for the prevention of torture, Olena Lytvynenko, deputy Head of the CoE Office in Ukraine, Kostiantyn Autukhov, National Consultant of the Council of Europe, Andriy Spivak, Justice Sector Coordinator of the European Union Delegation to Ukraine, representatives of the Ombudsperson’s office, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Supreme Court, the state institutions “Probation in Ukraine”, “Health Protection Centre”, Bila Tserkva Penitentiary Staff Training Centre, NORLAU Project, Red Cross organisation and other.
“The CPT recommendations are the product of the long-lasting dialogue between the European Committee for the prevention of tortures and the Government of Ukraine since the moment Ukraine has joined the Council of Europe, precondition of which was to ratify the European Convention on prevention of tortures as an integral part to ensure the system of human rights protection, envisaged by the European Convention on Human Rights”, - said Mykola Gnatovskyi.
“The purpose of the analysis was to conduct a kind of “inventory” of the Committee's unfulfilled recommendations and to unify a large number of standards scattered in various reports”, - said Olena Lytvynenko.
The consolidated report definitely provides an overview of measures taken by the Ukrainian authorities as well as the outstanding issues to be addressed in response to the structural problems in the Ukrainian penitentiary system identified in the CPT reports and the European Court of Human Rights’ judgments.
The full version is available in Ukrainian.
