The Office of the Ombudsman received almost 30,000 appeals on the protection of human rights in the security and defense sector during the year
During 2024, the Office of the Ombudsman received 123,000 appeals, of which about 30,000 related to issues of human rights protection in the security and defense sector. About this reported Human Rights Commissioner of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Dmytro Lubinets.
According to him, the largest share among applicants is the families of prisoners of war and missing persons — they submitted 27.3% of all applications. Appeals were also received from military servicemen and war veterans.
“The main priority for me personally is the return of Ukrainian citizens from Russian captivity. As of today, we have managed to return 4,552 heroes and heroines, including 174 civilians. We will make a separate report on the violation of the rights of Ukrainian prisoners of war by the Russian Federation. The total number of appeals in this direction: 29,957. I would like to note separately that in 2024 I received more than 13,500 appeals regarding the violation rights from active military, more than 1,200 applications were received from veterans”, – said Lubinets.
According to him, 445 appeals were received regarding rights violations in the process of granting the status of a combatant, a person with a disability as a result of the war, as well as a family member of the fallen Defenders of Ukraine. The main reasons for such appeals were the delay in processing documents and the presence of errors in already processed materials.
“We respond immediately to every such appeal. As an example, when last year the Defender of Ukraine approached us about the delay in granting him the status of UBD and issuing the corresponding certificate, I immediately sent a letter to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. After that, the decision to grant the status of UBD to the defender was approved. However, the commission did not make a decision for the previous five months, which violated the socio-economic rights of the defender.” – the ombudsman explained.
He emphasized that in 2024, the state actively improved the policy in the field of veterans’ protection, which made it possible, in particular, to simplify the procedure for obtaining the status of a participant in hostilities. Since the beginning of the year, it became possible to automatically assign this status based on data from the war veterans register, where information is recorded on the basis of certificates of direct participation in hostilities.
