Amnesty International assures that they want to understand the situation with the report on violations of international law by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The international human rights organization Amnesty International wants that the procedure for preparing the report, in which the Ukrainian military was accused of violating the laws of war, should be thoroughly checked by independent experts, reports DW.
Read also: AI used the testimony of people who passed the Russian “filtering”
As AI reported on August 12, the relevant expertise “is being initiated at the international level.” It is about checking the very process of preparing the material, as well as about the legal and political analysis of the report.
In addition, AI wants to analyze the practice of decision-making within the team and its organizational culture. “We want to understand exactly what went wrong and why, so that we can learn lessons and improve our work in the field of human rights,” says AI.
Read also: The Finnish branch of Amnesty International lost donors after the scandalous report on the work of the Armed Forces of Ukraine
The organization regrets that the press release dedicated to the study was published without sufficient context. “It did not pay due attention to Russian aggression in violation of international law and numerous war crimes committed by the Russian military and documented by Amnesty International,” human rights activists admit.
Read also: “These are the direct consequences of war”: European Commission reacted to the Amnesty International report
“The conclusions were not presented with the delicacy and precision that should be expected from Amnesty. This also applies to the subsequent reaction of the organization's international secretariat to public criticism,” AI believes.
“We condemn the instrumentalization of the press release in Russian by the authorities,” they added.
Report by Amnesty Internationalabout Ukraine was published on August 4. It stated that the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in violation of humanitarian law and the laws of war, create bases in residential areas, including schools and hospitals, thus putting the civilian population at risk. At the same time, the organization noted that this practice “in no way justifies indiscriminate Russian attacks”.
Amnesty's publication caused an extremely negative reaction in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi accused the organization of “immoral selectivity”. The Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications said that the authors of the report used the testimony of people who ended up in prisons or infiltration camps in the occupied territories.
Read also: The Times called Amnesty International “Putin's propagandists”
The Ukrainian office of Amnesty announced that it did not participate in the preparation of the report, its head Oksana Pokalchuk resigned in protest.
Related video
Amnesty International later stated that regrets the distress and anger caused by the publication of the report, but does not retract the information and conclusions contained therein.
