The Foreign Ministry of Pridnestrovie has carefully studied statements of Adviser for Human Rights of the Office of the UN High Commissioner to the Republic of Moldova Claude Cahn published by the “Ziarul de gardă” on August 20, 2015, and we have been very surprised by the boldness with which Mr. Cahn evaluates and undoes the results of the work of competent and talented Thomas Hammarberg – author of the Report on Human Rights in Pridnestrovie who had the mandate of the UN Senior Expert on Human Rights in Pridnestrovie, whom he himself calls “the Dalai Lama” of human rights.
The Foreign Ministry of the PMR believes that as results of six years of work in the Republic of Moldova the really active and politically unbiased defender of human rights and freedoms had to accumulate an extensive list of acute and serious questions, not only inaccurate and unsupported comments on other’s report and the steps following it.
A law “On social and legal protection from domestic violence” has not actually been adopted in Pridnestrovie yet, as so regretfully noted in Mr. Cahn’s statement. However, this only means that the proposed draft bill has not been sufficiently worked out, but not the Pridnestrovie’s intention to abandon combating this problem. Thus, for example, a center for women and children in challenging situations was established in the republic and the work on creation of a center for victims of domestic violence is being conducted with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). However, Mr. Cahn passes it over in silence knowingly.
To our great regret, during the whole period of his work Mr. Cahn have not seen much in Moldova, and when speaking of Pridnestrovie he kept quiet about many issues: issues on freedom of movement, criminal prosecution of officials, entrepreneurs, land users, and citizens of Pridnestrovie or on coercion to take a citizenship, finally, on disregard of the quite specific will expression of the Pridnestrovian people. Probably, there is an explanation somewhere why severely ill children with parents being holders of Russian passports could not have been transported by train through the Ukrainian border in order to get medical treatment in Russia, are so insignificant to the representative of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in comparison with the “excessive punitive sentences in such ordinary and trivial cases as storage of cannabis.”
Perhaps, the United Nations should seriously analyze the approach to delegating the representatives for long term work in the Republic of Moldova in order to ensure the effective implementation by them of the United Nations ideas and principles, but not to perform certain political functions and self-promote on other people’s work, to which they are related quite indirectly.
