(CN) — On the seventh anniversary of the violent and historic Maidan uprising in Ukraine, Europe's human rights court on Thursday ruled that Ukrainian police and authorities committed widespread abuses against protesters.
For many in Ukraine, the findings by the European Court of Human Rights, or ECHR, come as a long-awaited verdict by the Strasbourg court to condemn the crackdown on protests by Ukrainian forces as inhuman and a violation of international human rights laws.
The court's rulings involved 38 people who took part in the protests in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities. It declared protesters were brutally beaten, unlawfully arrested and dispersed and kidnapped by police or titushky, civilian mercenaries hired to help police crack down on Maidan protesters. In one of its five rulings, it found the state was guilty for the killing of one protester.
The brutality against protesters was a “strategy on the part of the authorities,” the court said. It also charged that Ukraine failed to properly investigate the alleged abuses.
“The authorities had deliberately tried to disrupt initially peaceful protests, using excessive violence and unlawful detention to achieve that,” the ECHR said in a news release.
The protests broke out in November 2013 after Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president, scuttled a cooperation agreement with the European Union just days before he was due to sign it. The agreement was meant to draw Ukraine away from Russia and closer into the EU's sphere.
By January 2014, the protest movement, based around Kiev's central Independence Square (“Maidan Nezalezhnosti,” in Ukrainian), continued to grow despite the police violence. Riots broke out and the uprising grew even larger with 800,000 people taking to the streets after Yanukovych signed laws restricting the right to protest. On Jan. 22, two protesters were killed in clashes with police.
Over the next month, the uprising gathered momentum and climaxed on Feb. 20 when scores of protesters in Independence Square were killed and injured after police and military fired on them. Yanukovych fled Ukraine and, with the crisis deepening, Russia illegally annexed Crimea and supported the secession of parts of eastern Ukraine. The Maidan uprising and continuing conflict in eastern Ukraine remain among the most volatile political issues in Europe.
In all, more than 100 people were killed during the protests, including 70 by gunfire, and thousands of people – both protesters and police – were injured, the court said.
Among those killed was Yuri Verbytskyy, an activist whose murder was examined by the ECHR. After the protests broke out, Verbytskyy, who was living in Lviv at the time and working as a seismologist, went to Kiev to take part in the demonstrations. On Jan. 21, he was injured in the eye during a clash between protesters and police.
He was taken to a hospital by Igor Lutsenko, a well-known journalist in Kiev who had become a Maidan protest leader whose role was to help injured protesters get to doctors. Lutsenko and Verbytskyy's brother jointly brought a case against Ukraine to the Strasbourg court.
In the early morning of Jan. 22, Lutsenko and Verbytskyy were abducted from the hospital by men in civilian clothes and severely beaten after they were driven to a remote area, the court said. Then they were taken to a garage and questioned by unidentified men about their involvement in the protests, according to court documents.
During the questioning, both were “subjected to repeated beatings and other forms of ill-treatment over the course of several hours,” the ruling said. It said Lutsenko’s abductors also placed a plastic bag over his head, letting him breath through a small hole, and tied his hands and legs with duct tape. He was dumped on a road near a village about 30 miles outside Kiev.
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