So far, only a few pilot complaints have been filed with the UN Human Rights Committee on behalf of children who were deported by Russia and returned to Ukraine. This was reported by Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer-expert at the Regional Center for Human Rights, and added that she hopes that in the future there will be hundreds of such complaints, UNN reports.
She said this during the event "Individual complaints as a mechanism of international child protection: cooperation of the state, civil society and international institutions".
We are returning children (who were deported by the Russian Federation - ed.), working with them here on the territory of Ukraine. These children witnessed or suffered from war crimes. Here, we had the opportunity to communicate with Kateryna Rashevska and the Regional Center for Human Rights, with whom we signed a memorandum in which we decided to work together with the returned children on filing individual complaints to the UN Committee on Human Rights and the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
Rashevska said that only a few pilot complaints have been filed with the UN Human Rights Committee so far
To date, we have filed only a few pilot complaints, they were all registered, they were all filed by parents on behalf of their children. In each case, it was about the imposition of Russian citizenship, and there were also complaints about freedom of movement. We were able to prove that the Russian Federation deported not only unaccompanied children, but also deported children from the besieged cities together with their parents, usually one of the parents, in our case it was the mother
Rashevska noted that this process has just begun and that preparing a complaint is a complex and lengthy process.
We have already processed 6 children, and we plan to apply for 10 to 15 by the end of our project, which will be approximately by the end of April-May this year. But we will not stop this activity after the project is over. We very much hope that we will be talking about hundreds of complaints in the future
She also commented on how long it would take to receive the results of the complaints.
The processes will not be short-lived and we will not get a decision tomorrow. However, we are ready to respond to the committee's communications by the end of 2025. This is an intermediate stage when they want to clarify something, get additional documents, they will get the position of the Russian Federation, the position of Ukraine
As Kateryna Rashevska explained to Suspilne, the International Criminal Court only considers cases of high-ranking officials, such as Putin or Belov: Putin or Lvova-Belova, and today it deals exclusively with deportations and forced displacement of children.
The UN Human Rights Committee, because there are not many international mechanisms available to such families and children. Our stories concern a whole range of child rights violations. Not all of them are classified as violations that reach the threshold of international crimes. That is, they are not dealt with by the International Criminal Court, but this does not mean that this is not a violation that should be punished