The European Court of Human Rights will hold a public hearing on 22 September in a case concerning ten Ukrainian children who were in children’s institutions during Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014.
This was reported by the ECHR, according to European Pravda.
The applicants claim that after Russia established de facto control over Crimea, the children were kept in the relevant institutions, information about their whereabouts was concealed, and they were also entered into Russian adoption systems or placed with foster families.
The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union says the children were also forced to take Russian citizenship and may later have been put up for adoption.
The UHHHRU believes such actions violated the children’s right to liberty and security of person, as guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights.
The organisation also says that the arbitrary change of the children’s citizenship and the posting of information about them on adoption websites failed to ensure respect for their social identity as citizens of Ukraine and its protection.
In the applicants’ view, this may also amount to a violation of the right to respect for private and family life.
Ahead of the hearing, the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the Council of Europe on the situation of Ukrainian children, Tordis Kolbrún Reykfjörd Gylfadóttir, stressed the need to keep drawing attention to the fate of Ukrainian children.
“Behind every such case is a child whose fate matters, whose identity must be protected and whose whereabouts must be known. We must not stop asking questions and demanding answers,” she said.
- Ukrainian law enforcement, together with human rights organisations, continue to document cases of deportation and unlawful transfer of Ukrainian children by the Russian authorities from temporarily occupied territories.
- According to Yanina Tertychna, head of a unit in the Department for the Protection of Children’s Interests and Countering Domestic Violence at the Office of the Prosecutor General, law enforcement are investigating another case of the mass deportation of 367 children from three boarding schools in Donetsk region, who were taken away a week before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
- Lawyer and attorney Kateryna Rashevska has also reported cases of the unlawful transfer of Ukrainian children prior to the full-scale invasion.
- At the same time, after the start of the full-scale war, the practice of unlawfully transferring Ukrainian children from occupied territories became systemic. Ukrainian authorities and human rights organisations continue to establish the circumstances of such cases, the children’s whereabouts, and to gather evidence of possible war crimes.