Lawyers of the Lithuanian human rights organization Every Human Being and activists of the Kidmapping project demanded that the UN investigate violations in the work of the head of the Russian office of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) Karim Atassi. They claim that he is inactive in the situation with the forced removal of Ukrainian children to Russia and covers up the crimes of the Russian authorities. Polina Murygina, lawyer and founder of the Every Human Being project, told The Insider about this.
Atassi has been Head of the UNHCR Office in the Russian Federation since May 2022. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is charged with leading and coordinating international action to ensure worldwide protection and solutions to refugees. The protection of refugees is its main mission. However, according to the human rights activist, Atassi does not cope with this task:
“We see that in relation to the deported children and civilian hostages, Karim Atassi did not fulfill his mission. In the case of the children, apart from visiting several places with Maria Lvova-Belova and claiming that the children were being kept in good conditions, he did not take any action.
Forced deportation of children falls under the conventional definition of genocide. This is not only a war crime, but also genocide. In fact, returned children are known to be physically abused, poorly fed and often kept in inhumane conditions.
Karim Atassi took no action to collect a family list of the children, or even a list of their places of detention. In comparison, the Kidmapping project has identified over 250 childcare facilities. At the same time, human rights defenders and activists are limited in their opportunities to visit these places – despite the statements made by Karim Atassi. Access to these children was promised to international humanitarian organizations. In March, Every Human Being approached Karim Atassi for assistance with such access. The answer never came.
The absence of surname lists by institutions makes it difficult to find the parents and relatives of such children. In some cases, the parents did not pass the filter. Every Human Being, for example, according to the grandmother's statement, is looking for an exported girl whose parents died.
Children continue to be adopted, which means that their search is complicated. Basically, no action was taken by Karim Atassi to document this war crime and act of genocide. He did not visit children's institutions for which there were testimonies of physical violence, etc., did not collect information on them. However, the separation of families is a violation of children's rights that needs to be restored.
He joins the Russian propaganda and speculates with numbers: the figure was announced in 1500-2500 "evacuated children". At the same time, there are more than 20,000 such children on the Children of War website alone. He did not ask Maria Lvova-Belova about the fate of the remaining 17,500 children.
There is not a single condemnation on his part, as a representative of the UN, of the actions of the Russian side in deporting children. He did not collect information on the deported children for transfer to the Ukrainian side. And he did not communicate with the latter.
Globally, his inaction as an official is an obstacle to the return of orphans to their homeland in Ukraine, as well as to the reunification of children with families, if there are families.
Humanitarian organizations are limited in their resources and capabilities. Without the assistance of Karim Atassi, there is virtually no possibility of visiting children, establishing a list by surname. This creates risks in the future – until the children are identified, until there is an exact number and their fate is not monitored, anything can happen to them. They are not safe."
Earlier, "Important Stories" estimated that Russia could take out about 2,500 orphans from Ukraine. The publication noted that in 2022, in a number of regions, the number of children who are registered in the data bank for adoption has increased dramatically. In two regions, journalists were confirmed that Ukrainian children are indeed being entered into this data bank. Among them are not only orphans who lived in Ukraine in orphanages, but also those whose parents died in the war. They are forced to weave camouflage nets for the front and meet with the Russian military.