Russia has committed serious violations of human rights and specific children's rights, as well as the Geneva Conventions, through the deportation of children from Ukraine, up to and including war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. These are the conclusions of a report by a fact-finding mission for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). It was tasked with establishing facts and circumstances in connection with the abduction of children and assessing them legally. On Thursday, the report was discussed at the OSCE Council in Vienna.
Stephan Löwenstein
Political correspondent based in Vienna.
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The mission was mandated by a group of 45 participating states under the so-called Moscow Mechanism, including countries such as Hungary, Serbia and Turkey, but not Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Central Asian states. Ukraine cooperated, Russia did not respond to a request to this effect. The report was written by lawyers Veronika Bílková (Czech Republic), Cecilie Hellestveit (Norway) and Elina Šteinerte (Latvia).
On the one hand, it is about orphans, most of whom live in homes, and on the other hand, about children separated from their parents who have been brought from Ukrainian territories (temporarily) controlled by Russian forces to Russia or to territories still occupied by Russia.
Brought to Siberia and the Pacific coast
The fact that this has happened in large numbers is recognized not only by Ukraine, but also by Russia in principle, although it is uncertain exactly how many children it affects due to the lack of documentation. The mission estimates several hundred thousand. The Russian side gave three main reasons for this: evacuation to protect against (war) danger, transfer for the purpose of adoption or guardianship, and allegedly temporary transfer to so-called recreation camps.
The fact that children have been openly taken away for adoption affects the territories that Russia has annexed according to its own understanding, in the case of Crimea since 2014. At the rest camps, parents and guardians were led to believe that it was only a few weeks; in many cases, pressure was exerted to obtain consent, or there was no consent at all.
In fact, the children were usually left permanently in Russia, taken from camp to camp, sometimes as far as Siberia and the Pacific coast, and in many cases then enrolled in school. There are also cases when children were separated from their parents at so-called filtration centers and deported to Russia.
Russia should have documented its whereabouts
As far as the evacuations are concerned, the mission concludes that they were partly justifiable, but partly not. In any case, regardless of the reason, Russia had not fulfilled its obligations to return the children to their relatives as quickly as possible, to notify them or at least to document their whereabouts.
Instead, it was concealed, and if individual parents were able to track down their children, then the retrieval was often made more difficult with harassment and costs. The children have been deprived of their right to identity in a variety of ways, for example through indoctrination with Russian national ideology. According to him, numerous rights are violated by facilitated naturalization and facilitated adoption, in which it is possible under Russian law to issue a new birth certificate with a forged date and place of birth.
Overall, the authors conclude, there have been numerous and overlapping violations of the rights of the children taken. The practice could even "constitute a crime against humanity for 'deportation or forced population transfer.'"