During the monitoring visits, the Ombudsman's Office staff accidentally discovered that officials of the Kyiv City Service for Children and Families and the Centre for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation of Children No. 1 had sent their close relatives to accompany the children abroad.
This was reported by the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets.
According to the Ombudsman, in March 2022, when active hostilities were taking place near Kyiv, 68 children from the Centre for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation of Children No. 1, accompanied by 20 people, were evacuated to the former youth camp in Wuppertal, Germany.
"These children are orphans, children deprived of parental care and children in difficult life circumstances. This year, during monitoring visits, my representatives visited institutions abroad where Ukrainian children are staying. We also visited the above-mentioned camp. Employees of the Ombudsman's Office were not allowed to enter. The reason was that there were no accompanying persons from Ukraine on the territory, and the children are exclusively under the care of the German side," Lubinets said.
The Ombudsman added that according to the German accompanying persons, there were 55 children at the beginning of the evacuation, but 68 were evacuated to Germany in accordance with the order of the Centre's director.
"The question is, where are the 13 children? The monitoring group was unable to verify this data due to the failure to provide information," the ombudsman said.
Afterwards, new unscheduled visits were made to the Service for Children and Families and the Centre for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation of Children No. 1 to clarify the circumstances, review evacuation documents and talk to the management.
"What we learnt was shocking: the management has no information about the situation in the institution! The Service and the Centre do not have copies of the documents or any documents on the conditions of the children's stay in the care of the German side. We managed to find out that among the accompanying persons during the evacuation, the official orders included people who had nothing to do with this area and had only become employees of the institutions the day before, and some had never been employed at all," Lubinets said.
Among these people are a close relative of the head of the Service for Children and Families and a close relative of the head of the Centre for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation, and among the accompanying persons are four more people whose reasons for leaving require further investigation.
"Each of the male escorts resigned from their positions after being outside the state, and none of them is currently employed by these bodies. Moreover, they have not returned to Ukraine. This fact suggests that it was all a "planned action"!" the Ombudsman stressed.
Lubinets added that although the leadership of both structures did not report all this at meetings or in reports, they continued to go on business trips to Wuppertal to meet their close relatives under the guise of work-related issues.
At the same time, one of the managers does not have a business trip report, and the other's is copied completely: it does not contain any information about the problems of children, the establishment of German custody, the dismissal of Ukrainian accompanying persons, and from year to year, in a report of one third of a page, one can see only a change in one figure: 2022 to 2023," the Commissioner added.
Lubinets sent relevant letters to the Prosecutor General's Office, the National Police, the Ministry of Social Policy, the National Social Service, and the Kyiv City State Administration, listing the facts he had discovered and stressing that they could be not isolated.