The human rights field of modern Ukraine: interaction between state and non-state actors.

Abstract

The situation with human rights violations in modern Ukraine remains quite acute, as evidenced by various sources at both the international and national levels, official and alternative. In such circumstances, human rights activities are of paramount importance. In the modern human rights field, formal (state) and informal (civil society) structures coexist, and rarely interact. A powerful tool in resolving systemic issues related to human rights is the institution of the ombudsman, represented by the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights and the President's specialized commissioners. The informal level is represented by non-governmental human rights NGOs, of which there are currently more than a hundred in Ukraine. They act as organized, structured, registered, etc. associations that work to promote and protect human rights and freedoms, to establish and maintain effective control over the observance of those freedoms and rights by the state, its bodies and officials. To achieve that, human rights organizations work simultaneously in such areas as the protection of human rights in specific cases (advocacy); dissemination of information on human rights, legal education work; analysis of the state of observance of human rights. As it was before, NGOs have different amounts of resources (background, experience, power, influence), depend on funding from foreign donors and compete with each other. One of the main resources for improving the effectiveness of the human rights field is the cooperation of the ombudsman with non-governmental organizations and the public. An example of cooperation is the model of Ukrainian National Preventive Mechanism (NPM), which has been operating in Ukraine since 2012 to prevent torture, although the format of this interaction has been criticized by experts in the context of the limited role of the public. The non-organizational level is represented by the individual practices of Ukrainians in the protection of human rights, the volume of which is increasing, but the efficiency remains low.