Ukraine

At the Gateway to Europe

In the five years since the "Orange Revolution“, Ukraine has almost completely vanished from media reports. Nevertheless, this nation at the gateway to Europe plays a vital role: refugees from a multitude of crisis areas are surging into Ukraine where they hope to find a way into the European Union. At the same time, the rights of torture victims living in the Ukraine are being systematically violated.

The IRC in Kiev

The International Medical Rehabilitation Center (IRC) in Kiev provides medical and psychosocial care for around 400 torture victims each year. Until recently, the IRC treated mostly survivors of communist despotism. Thanks to a European Union financed partnership with the bzfo, the IRC was able to expand its services to include traumatized refugees and also to provide care for the increasing number of current victims of human rights violations in Ukraine.

Activities

In cooperation with regional United Nations offices, the IRC treats around 200 refugees each year from more than 20 nations. The homelands of these persons include Afghanistan, Chechnya, Armenia and Uzbekistan but also African countries such as Somalia and Angola.

The IRC also cares for around 200 Ukrainian victims of torture each year: including victims of abuse in police custody and in the army, as well as victims of Stalinism and Gulag-survivors. Even today the IRC treats Ukrainian survivors of the Holocaust, as well as former slave laborers under the Nazi dictatorship.

The team in Kiev works not only in the field of therapeutic care; the work done by the IRC is promoted through media campaigns and nation-wide workshops that focus on the subjects of refugee assistance, victim protection, intercultural therapy and psychiatry reforms.

Through the documentation of human rights violations and background interviews with public policy makers, the IRC has been able to contribute to the prevention of arbitrary use of state power in Ukraine. In its journal Socio-Psychological and Medical Aspects of Cruelty, the IRC regularly informs over 3000 professionals in 12 countries of the former Soviet Union about methods for medical and psychosocial treatment of victims of torture.

Links

www.irc-kyiv.org

Contact