Investigating Hate Crimes in Ukraine: Launch Event
When
Where
Organized by
Following a year of consultations with civil society, the National Police, the Ministry of Internal Affairas and the Prosecutor General’s Office, the event will see the launch of two new tools to assist Ukrainian law enforcement officials in better identifying, categorizing, investigating and prosecuting hate crimes. Categorizing and Investigating Hate Crimes in Ukraine: A Practical Guide, and its stand-alone Annex Using Bias Indicators: A Practical Tool for Police provide users with concrete technical guidance on dealing with various hate crime scenarios relevant in Ukraine’s context. As such, the two Guides build on and complement an internal instruction issued by the National Police in 2017.
Besides police and prosecutors, the new Guides will help civil society to hold criminal justice officials to account when dealing with hate crimes. At the event, ODIHR will also for the first time in Ukraine present its awareness-raising videos on hate crime, which were provided with a Ukrainian-language voiceover for this occasion.
The main goals of the event are:
- to introduce the new tools to practitioners from the police, to prosecutors and civil society activists monitoring hate crimes;
- to discuss with the national authorities and other participants how the Guides will be disseminated in order to reach their end users; and
- to secure commitment by the authorities to use the Guides and consequently discuss how the Guides’ principles will be operationalized in the work of the police, prosecutors, intergovernmental and civil society organization.
The one-day event’s agenda follows these main goals, with each theme introduced by ODIHR, a government and a civil society representative.
To that end, ODIHR has invited participants from the Human Rights Department, the Main Investigation Department and the Prevention Department of the National Police. The Ministry of Interior is represented by its Human Rights Monitoring Department, and the Office of the Prosecutor General has also been invited to take part in the launch event. Representatives of civil society organizations and intergovernmental organizations working on hate crimes in Ukraine will also be present – namely, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM), the United Nations Regufee Agency (UNHCR), and the European Union Advisory Mission (EUAM).