While working at PACE, Yevheniia Kravchuk, a member of the Ukrainian delegation to PACE and Deputy Chair of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, together with Serhii Sobolev, a member of the Committee on Legal Policy, took the opportunity to talk to European parliamentarians about the investigation of russian crimes against media freedom and journalists.
Ukrainian parliamentarians, in particular, held a meeting with Pavlo V. Pushkar, Head of the Department for the Execution of Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, Directorate General of Human Rights and Rule of Law of the Council of Europe.
«We discussed how journalists in russia's war against Ukraine constitute a separate, particularly vulnerable category that the aggressor state deliberately targets, as already reflected in the practice of the ECHR,» Yevheniia Kravchuk said.
According to her, there are already inter-state decisions in the Crimea case in which journalists are explicitly identified as a separate group of victims of violations. At the same time, in the joint lawsuit of Ukraine and the Netherlands against russia, the case materials contain a detailed record of violations of the European Convention on Human Rights specifically regarding journalists as a group.
«These are extremely important legal guidelines for our work. I would like to thank my colleagues from the Council of Europe for their professional dialogue,» said Yevheniia Kravchuk, adding that the analysis of relevant cases, in particular those concerning russian propaganda, will continue. One of the most telling examples, she said, was Google's successful case, in which the ECHR clearly stated that russia's attempts to force online platforms to remove legitimate content, including materials supporting Ukraine and critical statements about aggression, are a form of censorship and violate freedom of expression.