Are the police going to respect declared rights?
Soon Ukrainian police will start behaving like Hollywood film cops when they apprehend offenders or suspects, i.e., they will read out the charge against the person they are arresting. This follows from a recent directive issued by Minister of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko.
“Some will call it a mere declaration, but this is a worldwide practice and Ukrainian law-enforcement bodies must get used to it,” the minister said. In July 2005 President Yushchenko urged the Ministry of Internal Affairs to teach the police force the rules for dealing with average citizens. The instruction will take effect next week.
However, for the past two months the Ministry of Justice has been unable to decide on how to monitor this process. The situation is ambiguous. It is common knowledge that citizens’ rights are violated every day, especially when they deal with police. So the impression is that policemen will instead have to read out the arrested person’s rights to themselves and their colleagues in order to abide by the code of conduct within the established framework.
Recently, the Police Academy of Ukraine launched a manual that instructs would-be guardians of public order not to use torture in their work. The situation is self-explanatory. The Day asked some experts to comment on the rights that Ukrainians have when they confront the police, how often these rights are violated, and how one can combat the violations.
There are two kinds of arrests in Ukraine — criminal and administrative. A criminal arrest is carried out if operational information (verbal or material evidence) shows that the individual has committed a crime. Administrative offenses comprise breaches of the peace, including drunken behavior, failure to produce an ID or a residence permit, and resisting an officer in the line of duty.
“The three basic rights of an arrested person,” says Yevhen Zakharov, head of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, “are the right to inform a third party of the arrest, the so-called one-call right; the right to the services of a lawyer from the moment of arrest; and the right to medical care. Unfortunately, the latter is not even clearly explained in the Ukrainian law.”
Nor is it always possible to take advantage of the right to have a lawyer — at least, not immediately. The current law does not clearly spell out at what point the arrest begins — when the individual is actually arrested or when a report is drawn up. When courts look into this matter, they almost always conclude that the departure point in counting the 72 hours during which an individual can be detained is the report on the arrest of a suspect rather than the actual arrest.
“It may take from a few hours to twenty-four between the actual arrest and the report,” Zakharov say. “The point is that policemen first of all try to interrogate the detained person and get some evidence from him/her. Naturally, they would prefer doing this without a lawyer and therefore do not record the arrest immediately. Moreover, there are many other ways to deny a person the right immediately to use the services of a lawyer.”
As for apprehending those who breach the peace, there is another field of abuse, quite a broad one at that. “In reality, lack of documents or a residence registration stamp is often a pretext rather than the real reason for an arrest,” says lawyer A. Diachenko. “Policemen do not exactly rush to arrest tramps even if they are lying on the sidewalk. They need decent-looking people, who have money to pay a fine, or ‘ransom,’ and can thus avoid being arrested.
“In general, I don’t think the idea of reading out a person’s rights, as well as respect for these rights, will ever catch on in this country. The point is not so much in policemen’s low salaries as in their mentality and, what is more, their habits. They are used to impunity. So we will have to wait for a new generation of policemen to appear. To be more exact, we should not wait for them but actively raise this generation. I think something may change in about two decades.”
Our advice is: until something has changed, do not approach the blurred line of what can be called an offense. And if, God forbid, you are under arrest, demand that your rights be read out, a report quickly drawn up, and a lawyer immediately summoned. You have to remember that prevention of torture by the police in this country is unfortunately still at the stage where the problem is being formulated and manuals are being published.
