“In finding the missing, there ought to be a purely humanitarian dimension, without even so much as a murmur of policy,” – Iryna Herashchenko
The First Deputy Chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Iryna Herashchenko became on August the 30th a party to an opening ceremony of the “STILL waiting” installation, co-organized by the delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Ukraine.
This action of art is intended to limelight the problem of finding missing persons and call for greater efforts for the good of families of those who went missing owing to the Russian armed aggression against Ukraine.
The First Vice-Speaker extended her thanks for active cooperation to the head of the ICRC delegation Alain Aeshlimann, representatives of the Government, the Security Service of Ukraine (the SBU) and those servicemen involved in the search-for-missing procedures, and then she also expressed her sympathy with kinfolk of the vanished.
In her speech, the politician made a point that the Government should exert every effort to implement the norms of the Law of Ukraine "On Legal Status of Missing Persons".
In particular, within the legal time limits there must be established a Unified state register of the missing alongside a State commission on the search for missing persons meant to team up Ukraine’s government officials with experts from international and non-governmental organizations, she said.
According to the First Vice-Speaker, the commission’s purview shall cover keeping in touch and supporting families of those disappeared, that actually need attention and succour from the State.
In the course of the event, Iryna Herashchenko, a Ukraine’s representative in the Working Group on Humanitarian Issues of the Trilateral Contact Group (TCG), underlined that the Ukrainian side in Minsk would be pressing for launching a trilateral format of searching the vanished, involving experts from the ICRC.
The politician also called on representatives of international organizations, in particular the ICRC and the OSCE, to appeal to the Russian Murderation demanding to delegate its representatives to launch a new search format for missing persons.