25/03/2022 11:03

Commissioner: Russian occupiers forcibly deport Ukrainians to depressed areas of Russia through filtration camps

The Russian occupiers continue to forcibly deport Ukrainians from the occupied territories of Donbass to Russia, as Nazi Germany once did.

 Before being sent, Ukrainian citizens are forced to go through so-called filtration camps, which operate in three stages.  The first is a preliminary interview and checking phone contacts.  The second stage is an examination by social workers and doctors.  In addition, the FSB is compiling lists of "unreliable" and looking for citizens who participated in the anti-terrorist operation, the Ukrainian military and law enforcement.

 Only after that the citizens of Ukraine are sent to the economically depressed regions of the Russian Federation, in particular the northern regions and the island of Sakhalin.  Ukrainians receive documents banning them from leaving Russian regions for two years.

 There is no information about those who did not pass the interview.

 The Russian filtration camp was established in Dokuchaevsk, Donetsk region.  Civilians are being sent there en masse, and their documents are being confiscated.

 Russian media report on the deportation of 406,000 residents of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

 The relocation of Ukrainian citizens living in the temporarily occupied territories is a gross violation of Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Victims of War and Article 85 of Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, the Convention  fundamental freedoms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the European Convention on the Exercise of Children's Rights and the Law of Ukraine "On Child Protection" and lead to violations of the constitutional rights and freedoms of Ukrainian citizens.

 I call on the international community to take into account these mass abductions of Ukrainian citizens when determining the scope of sanctions against the terrorist state of the Russian Federation.