Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets believes that there is no human rights protection system in the world today. He said this during the discussion of the New Country project "Punish evil: the Rome statute and the restart of international justice".
The Commissioner noted that the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Russian Ombudsman Lvov-Belova only during a full-scale war, but Russia has been deporting Ukrainians since 2014. Russians have been stealing Ukrainian children since Crimea.
"Where was the international community before, when Russians publicly came to the territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, chose children, adopted them, changed their passports, birth certificates, changing their data, and took them to the territory of the Russian Federation. What was the reaction? None," he said.
As of now, there is evidence that 20,000 Ukrainian children have been either deported or relocated within the occupied territory, often without their parents' consent. Russia's only responsibility for this so far is two arrest warrants.
Since 2014, Russia has violated all standards of treatment of civilians in the occupied territories. There is no responsibility for this either.
Ukraine managed to return 161 civilians from Russian captivity. Each of them told about torture. This week we managed to return an entire family from the occupation. The Russians held the man for a month and knocked out his teeth. He lost about ten kilograms in a month. The victim's wife told the Irish prime minister about this fact when he came to Kyiv. Such cases are systemic, and Russia has been using them since 2014.
We managed to return 3,520 prisoners of war. Their rights were also violated, which was recorded even by the UN. 95% of the prisoners were subjected to constant torture, including sexual violence. And Russia has not been held accountable for this. In addition, Russia does not return even seriously wounded prisoners. International organisations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, are doing nothing.
According to Lubinets, ICRC representatives said that they could not claim that the Russians did not allow them to visit the prisoners because they were "neutral".
"And all our arguments, arguments that you should not be neutral, we do not demand that you say that Russia is the aggressor and Ukraine is the object of aggression, but you must be objective," he said.
At the same time, the Red Cross visits Ukrainian prison camps almost every week, communicates confidentially with Russians and verifies each of their reports of alleged violations. And there is no reaction to the total violation of human rights by Russia.
"We see a crisis of international organisations," Lubinets said.
To remedy this, Ukraine is using the peace formula.
"This is our plan to respond. We see that the system is not working, it is not there," he explained.
At the meeting in Switzerland, the participants of the Peace Summit proposed new approaches to the return of prisoners.
"We have not just an international conflict. We have a conflict between two groups of countries that differ in the type of governance. On the one hand, there are countries with autocracies and dictatorial rule. On the other hand, there are democratic countries. We are actually in a state of the Third World War, because there are groups of countries that are at war with each other," he said.
The Ombudsman added that Ukrainians are told on international platforms that they must sit down at the negotiating table with Russians. And other countries should create conditions for this "agreement".
"Big players, when they put human rights protection and financial gain from trade with the Russians in the balance, choose money. Finance," Lubinets said.
Ukraine wants effective sanctions to be imposed on Russia. The Ombudsman cited the example of Iran, which is under sanctions but is able to sell weapons to Russia that kill Ukrainians. "This will never end unless the sanctions are really effective," he said.
Ukraine also wants the Russians to be excluded from all international organisations. As of now, Russia has been expelled from almost all major ombudsman organisations.
"There are two organisations left. One, I know it will be next month. I am going there, I will speak, there will be a decision. The last one, the fourth, I hope it will be the beginning of next year," he said.
According to Lubinets, next month Russia will be expelled from the Mediterranean Ombudsman Organisation, and it may be expelled from the Association of Human Rights Institutions in February. Russia has already been expelled from two other organisations.