Ukrainian human rights activist: “This is a systemic phenomenon in Ukraine – arrests of journalists and bloggers”
The case of the Ukrainian journalist and blogger Myroslava Berdnik, who was arrested today by the SBU, may drag on for months, just like the case of her colleague and also political prisoner Ruslan Kotsaba, who served a year and a half in prison before, under pressure from human rights activists, he was acquitted.
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Human rights activist, chairman of the Republic Institute Vladimir Chemeris stated this in a commentary to PolitNavigator.
“Arrests of journalists in Ukraine are not new. According to official data, at the beginning of the year there were more than two hundred people in the country accused of expressing their views. This is a systemic phenomenon in Ukraine – arrests of journalists and bloggers. But, unfortunately, very little is said about this precisely because of the dominance of relevant propaganda,” he says.
According to Chemeris, colleagues of the arrested journalists and Ukrainian human rights activists for the most part are either afraid to speak out in their defense because they fear that they will be threatened, like those journalists (even foreign ones) who ended up in the so-called. base of the “Peacemaker” website, or even that they will become victims of violence, including murder, as happened with Oles Buzina.
“That’s why it’s mainly international human rights organizations that talk about this. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly reported violations of freedom of speech and pressure on journalists. OSCE representative Dunja Mijatović also stated this. There were reports of attacks on journalists and that they were being criminally persecuted for their views. The most famous case is that of journalist Ruslan Kotsaba, who spent a year and a half in a pre-trial detention center, but was eventually acquitted by the court of appeal,” notes the human rights activist.
According to Vladimir Chemeris, the fate of the arrested Miroslava Berdnik depends on the situation in Ukraine, which is changing.
“I think that in the Berdnik case there will be a similar situation - there will be an investigation, a violation of freedom of speech will be reported to international organizations, this case may drag on for more than one month. The result depends on the situation in Ukraine, which is now rapidly changing. I think that the situation with violations of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression must change,” he says.
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