Ukrainian police violates citizens’ property right
The Ukrainian police created a system of violation of citizens’ property right. Such are the results of a research “Monitoring of observance of property right in the activity of the bodies of internal affairs: the current situation and problems”. The research was conducted by Odessa Human Rights Group Veritas under the support of the Rule of Law Program of the International Renaissance Foundation. Human rights activists presented the results of the research in Kyiv on February 28.
Serhiy Shvets, an expert of the research, said that Ukraine has an operating armed body of the executive authority, which the society can finance only for not more than 40 per cent – this is the amount, allocated for the Ukrainian police from the state budget. However, experts estimated that additional financing, generated from paid services and non-transparent sources of financing of the police, amounted to almost 12 billion UAH ($1.5 billion) in 2010.
“The mechanism of depriving the citizens of their property is about that people are forced to pay for the police’s actions, which they are obliged to conduct for free. We are talking about the services of traffic police, subdivisions of the authorization system, Department of Citizenship, Immigration and Registration of Individuals, etc. Most of these services are imposed on citizens”, emphasized Shvets.
Andriy Tolopilo, Head of Veritas Group, added that such a ‘charity’, introduced by the police for their own benefit, is nothing else but a systemic deprivation of citizens of their property. In his view, “using the right for receiving charitable contributions, the police actually created a system of ‘exactions’, imposed on dependent enterprises, organizations and citizens”.
The research shows that employees of the Ukrainian police often commit different crimes in order to seize citizens’ property. Extortion of bribes is the most common crime. Also, sometimes people are kidnapped or unlawfully detained for the purpose of further extortion of ransom or police torture them in order to seize their funds and they also commit other crimes, including robbery with and without violence, theft, fraud, etc.
According to experts, unlawful arrest of vehicles and their delivery to paid police compounds is one of the most common and frequent types of violations. Every year police arrests 7,000 vehicles due to different reasons, most of which are unlawful. According to Rostyslav Shaposhnikov, the Head of the Road Control Project, filing a lawsuit is the most effective way to fight this abuse.
Odessa Human Rights Group Veritas
Andrey Tolopilo
(+38 048) 784 03 94
andrey_tolopilo@mail.ru
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The aim of the Rule of Law Program is to support the civil society initiatives directed to the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms, to promote strengthened legal consciousness and public activity at the central and local levels.
