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NGO 'Proliska' proposes creation of commission on spontaneous burials in Donbas
KYIV. Dec 9 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Employees of the public organization "Proliska" advocate the creation of a commission on the issues of natural burials in Donbas.
As the chief expert on advocacy of the civilian organization Ihor Sosonsky said, at present, more than ten cases of spontaneous burials of civilians, who died of natural causes or died as a result of hostilities during the period of active hostilities, but were not properly buried, have been recorded in Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the period from 2014 to 2015.
According to him, in each of these cases, there was no medical certification of the death of the person due to the lack of full-fledged work of local government bodies, law enforcement agencies, ambulances and utilities. The persons most often were buried in the courtyards of residential buildings, in gardens, ravines, craters from shells, or in cemeteries, but without fixing the burial.
"This leads to a violation of the rights of the deceased to proper burial, to a further violation of the rights of relatives and friends to visit graves and formalize inheritance. We propose to start the work of a commission that will fix natural burials, exhume bodies for reburial. And also establish the identity of the exhumed. And also to establish the identity of the exhumed bodies using DNA tests at the expense of the state, if there is no other possibility," Sosonsky said at a press conference in Kyiv on Wednesday.
He also said that the proper burial of the remains and ashes of the deceased (perished) is an obligation of the state.
"Ukraine has ratified the additional protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1949, which notes that the state has an obligation to urgently implement measures to search for the dead (deceased) and their proper burial. This applies not only to military personnel, but also to civilians who died during hostilities," the expert said.
According to Rodion Lebedev, head of the Proliska humanitarian center in Avdiyivka, the creation of such a commission would greatly simplify the bureaucratic mechanism for the relatives of buried persons to obtain a certificate of their death through the courts.
"That the establishment of the fact of death through the court is a rather complicated and lengthy procedure, rather than the establishment of the fact of death in the administrative order by local authorities. It is not always possible to obtain a death certificate through the court," he said.
