Institute of Human rights and prevention of extremism and xenophobia is created in Ukraine

Ukraine has made a new important step towards European standards in protection of human rights, ethnic or linguistic minorities. The Institute of Human rights and prevention of extremism and xenophobia that will combine the best world’s experience in human rights area with projects to prevent extremism and xenophobia is created by a group of community activists, politicians, researchers and other caring people.

“Ukraine has a unique multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multilingual experience”, - said the founder of the Institute and one of the members of its Strategic Council, member of Ukrainian Parliament Alexander Feldman. “This experience should be studied, analyzed and new steps should be proposed to strengthen the positive and neutralize the negative tendency”, said the Ukrainian politician. He emphasized, that Ukraine, which lies on the crossroads of civilizations and is a unique multilingual and multi-religious country, is much more vulnerable to adverse global processes, than mono-ethnic countries.  Ignoring xenophobia, self-soothing with the present level of social tolerance will only contribute to the growth of negative tendencies that sooner or later may take extremist forms”, says MP Alexander Feldman. “We need a society, where everyone has the right to be themselves, where there is no persecution or harassment because of nationality, language or religion; this is the task not only for the Head of State of the Government, but the task for every responsible politic, for our society”, said the founder of the Institute right after its official registration.

In the work of the Institute will be of great importance the question of promotion of adherence to respect for the rights to the highest European standards, which is essential in the policy of the President Yanukovich on European integration.

It is planned, that the institute will prepare annual reports on human rights situation in Ukraine, conduct projects in order to study the socio-political and economical aspects of integration of minorities in Ukrainian society, coordinate state, civic, private institutions for most effective protection of human dignity.