March 7, 2017
Three years after Russian forces seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, political repression has affected residents’ lives in a variety of ways.
The Russian government claims that Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula is part of its territory, but it refuses to take responsibility for the daily abuses perpetrated against Crimea’s residents, including a crackdown on the Crimean Tatar community, violations of press freedom, disappearances of activists, and a general breakdown in the rule of law.
The international community is quite clear on the matter: Russia is illegally occupying Crimea and violating human rights there on a massive scale. In November, the International Criminal Court stated in preliminary findings that the March 2014 annexation of Crimea constituted a violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and was “equivalent to an international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation.”
Here are five ways the Russian occupation has affected human rights in Crimea, as documented in the latest edition of Freedom in the World.
Source: Freedom House
