The spokesperson for the European External Action Service urged all parties involved in the conflict in eastern Ukraine to respect their obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law.
In a report dated 12 March, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) identified and further confirmed a consistent pattern of arbitrary detention, “often amounting to enforced disappearance, torture and the ill-treatment of conflict-related detainees in the so-called 'Luhansk People's Republic' and 'Donetsk People's Republic'”. “These practices and the impunity of their perpetrators must end”, demanded the EEAS spokesperson. They also called for immediate and full investigations into these reported violations, describing the accounts from released detainees of the conditions of their detention in the OHCHR reports as “appalling”.
The EEAS spokesperson also stated that independent international observers must be granted full and unconditional access to all detainees and places of detention.
“The EU expects Russia to exert its considerable influence over the armed formations it backs in order to achieve a sustainable and peaceful political solution to the conflict in eastern Ukraine”, the spokesman said.
See OHCHR report: https://bit.ly/3dxxWiz (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)