Study visit from activists from Ukraine to the HLC

Representatives of the ‘Justice for Peace in Donbas’ Coalition, comprising several human rights organizations from East Ukraine, began their study visit to the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) on Monday, May 11^th, 2015. The organizations comprising the ‘Justice for Peace in Donbas’ Coalition have been working intensively on gathering and documenting information on human rights violations and on advocating the rights of the victims of the conflict currently ongoing in the east of Ukraine. Owing to the armed conflict, most of them have been forced during the past year to leave Luhansk and Donetsk and to continue working on documenting human rights violations in the refuge.

The representatives of the organizations from the Ukraine arrived as part of the UN Development Programme in Ukraine project, with the objective of learning about the process of researching and documenting human rights violations and the subsequent use of this material in the process of establishing the truth and responsibility for the crimes committed. During the visit to the HLC, the organizations from Ukraine will be introduced to the work of the HLC on research and documentation, regional truth-seeking initiatives, war crimes trials before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the courts in Serbia, and the process of advocating the right of victims to reparation. The representatives of the organizations from Ukraine will not only meet with the representatives of the HLC and HLC Kosovo, but will also have an opportunity to talk to the representatives of the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor, the Republic of Serbia Ministry of Justice, and other human rights organizations from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.