The participants of the meeting were Simon Huang, Head of the Political Section of the US Embassy in Ukraine, Tetyana Stechak of the Political Section, Eskender Bariiev, Chairman of the Board of the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre, Head of the Legal and Foreign Affairs Department of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, and Lyudmila Korotkikh, Manager of the CRC.
It was emphasised that Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians in the occupied territories continue to be detained in cases related to Hizb ut-Tahrir, Noman Chelebidzhikhan battalion, ‘high treason’, ‘espionage’, ‘discrediting the All-Russian Federation’, etc.
Mr Simon Huang was separately interested in the issue of bringing to justice those responsible for human rights violations in the occupied Crimea.Eskender Bariiev, in his turn, informed that the CTRC is systematically working towards the adaptation of laws similar to the Magnitsky Act in order to impose personal sanctions on those responsible for human rights violations in Crimea.
‘We have developed the Methodology for assessing the expediency of imposing personal sanctions against persons in the temporarily occupied territories who cooperate with the occupation administrations of the Russian Federation. Based on this methodology, the CTRC experts presented a list of 166 persons who violate human rights in the occupied Crimea,’ the expert explained.
In September 2021, the Crimean Tatar Resource Centre sent a sanctions list of 50 persons responsible for human rights violations in the occupied Crimea to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, the Office of the President of Ukraine, the Security Service of Ukraine, as well as the embassies of the USA, UK, Canada, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the EU.
In particular, Tetyana Stechak emphasised that personal sanctions had already been imposed in the USA on a number of people from the CTRC list.
The interlocutors agreed to co-operate in exchanging information for the US Department of State’s annual report on human rights practices.
