On 16th May in Vienna, in front of representatives of the OSCE participating States’ delegations and the OSCE officials, a civil society leader from Ukraine, Oleksandra Romantsova, of the Center for Civil Liberties and Euromaidan SOS, on behalf of CivilMPlus, urged the OSCE to immediately strengthen its presence in Ukraine to ensure a holistic monitoring of human rights violations amid the Russian invasion.

She stressed that only by having a permanent monitoring tool on the ground will the OSCE be able to effectively follow war crimes and develop a duly response.

Oleksandra also stressed that the operational work of the OSCE Moscow Mechanism concerning the monitoring of the situation in Ukraine should serve as a blueprint for the OSCE’s future work with other countries. For example, it can be used when monitoring the suppression of civil societies and human rights violations in Belarus and Russia.

The Moscow Mechanism is named after the city where the Conference on the Human Dimension took place in 1991. It allows for one or more OSCE participants to request a mission of experts to address a particular question of human rights.