The Foundation delivers two workshops in the Vinnytsia and Lviv Regions
From 4-7 November 2019, the Foundation held two workshops in Vinnytsia and Lviv, Ukraine. The topic was the rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs), their protection through international and domestic law as well as the obstacles to their effective enforcement in Ukraine. The participants included legal professionals from legal aid centres in the Vinnytsia and Lviv Regions. In Lviv, the regional representatives of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights also attended the event.
Two Ukrainian legal experts, the Head of the IDP Section of the Office of the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights and a Senior Research Fellow from the Foundation served as trainers at the workshops. They discussed several issues related to the legal protection of IDPs from a comparative, domestic and international law perspective. The Head of the IDP section in the Commissioner’s Office delivered a presentation on the work of the Office to protect and promote IDP’s rights and the current challenges with respect to the existing legal framework and its implementation. Other topics discussed included the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the concept of durable solutions for IDPs, their access to justice and administrative services as well as the problem of restitution and compensation.
The trainers and the participants also discussed the issue of stigmatisation and discrimination of IDPs and its implications in different areas of social and political life. In several working groups, the participants discussed access to legal remedies, housing issues, access to civil documentation and other challenges IDPs face in their daily lives. They equally attempted to develop shared approaches and solutions to these problems.
The workshop in Lviv closed the workshop series planned and implemented in the framework of the German Federal Foreign Office funded project “Access to Justice and Administrative Services for Victims of the Armed Conflict in Ukraine“.