Ukrainian human rights activists are concerned about an attempt to restrict access to a visa-free regime with the European Union to inhabitants of occupied by Russia Crimea and NGCA of Donbass.
The statement of Alexander Turchynov on the necessity of the carrying out of through checks all who wish to get biometric passport from the persons, arriving from occupied territories, has appeared on the National Safety and Defense Council website on June 22, 2017.
As lawyers note, ‘such statement wasn’t accidental’, because ‘at the same day the bill under the No. 6330 ‘On Amending Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine Concerning the Identification of a Person for Forming, Issuing, Exchange, Recognizing Void and Destroying Documents Confirming Ukrainian Citizenship, Identifying the Individual or Its Special Status’ for the authorship of 14 ‘Narodny front’ (People’s Front) MPs was registered in Verkhovna Rada.
According to human rights advocates, ‘t5he proposed innovations in the majority duplicate the already existing norms of legislation, but the explanatory note with the text indicates that a separate procedure for checking citizens of Ukraine from the Donbass and Crimea before entering information into the Unified State Demographic Register is due to the fact that the State Migration Service doesn’t have access to paper Documents remaining in the territory of occupied Crimea and NGCA’.
Lawyers confirm that ‘legislators shift responsibility to citizens for the fact that state bodies don’t have access to information that they previously collected, processed and stored’.
‘The bill itself is electoral enough. People’s deputies, instead of being consistent in the policy of reintegration of the Donbass and Crimea, establishing and maintaining links with uncontrolled territories, flirt with the topic of ‘visa-free’ and armed conflict, dividing Ukrainian society and discriminating certain categories of citizens. We consider that procedures must be the same for all categories of citizens and mechanism for their implementation is such that it doesn’t restrict the right to freedom of movement and privacy’, Chairman of the Board of the ‘Vostok-SOS’ Charitable Foundation Alexandra Dvoretskaya has commented the bill.
We note, that ‘except check of submitted by the applicant documents for obtaining a biometric passport, the State Migration Service will have an access to the bank secrecy, as well as to an unlimited amount of personal data of such a person without his consent, and the term of such verification may be up to six months, which can lead to corruption in the forming of biometric passports for a certain category of citizens of Ukraine’.
We would remind that lawyers of Charitable Foundation ‘Vostok-SOS’ applied to President of Ukraine Peter Poroshenko in connection with the statement of the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Oleksandr Turchynov about ostensibly necessary checks of the residents of the Non-Government Controlled Areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions and occupied by Russia Crimea before getting of biometric passports.