The most well-known products of the Association UMDPL:

Monitoring campaign “Police under control”

“Police under control” –an all-Ukrainian campaign of a public monitoring where public activists check how honestly and according to the law police officers fulfill their obligations.

First of all, monitoring applies to services and police departments which have direct contact with population: patrol services, neighborhood police inspectors, neighborhood police stations. Monitoring provides for acquisition of information about work of such services and evaluation of law enforcement officers’ activities, in particular, compliance of their work with normative acts of National Police and the MIA of Ukraine.

Experts prepare recommendations for National Police and the MIA of Ukraine on improvement of law-enforcement work with people. This information collected “in the field” displays real practice of the legislature use. Later this information shall be included in analytical reports, practical textbooks and propositions to draft laws.

Association UMDPL coordinates the campaign. Its experts developed instruments for public monitoring and organized trainings for activists of non-governmental organizations and journalists.

Activists, who are engaged in monitoring, are called monitors.

Mobile application “Adviser “Police under control”

Mobile application “Police under control” – is legal information on how to behave with law enforcement officers in different situations, in particular conflict. Everyone can download this legal adviser for free from the web site of the Association UMDPL. There are also buttons for Android and iOS users, or people can download application from the Google Play/iTunes.

“Anyone can become a victim of illegal actions by law enforcement bodies. Formerly, we published many materials with legal advices but it is not always comfortable to carry the brochure around. Now anyone can find such an adviser in his/her cell phone and have important information anytime for free” – Vadim Pivovarov – executive director of the Association UMDPL underlined relevance of the adviser.

The adviser consists of 17 sections with materials about a contact with police officers: “Meeting police officers on the street”, “Search of the body and belongings”, “Use of special measures”, “Police stopped your car”, “You are in the room for detainees”, “Policeman came to you”, “Photo- video-, audio- recording of police actions”, etc. The adviser also provides phone numbers and addresses of territorial police departments, contacts of organizations, where people can get consultations or legal assistance.

 

Scientific edition “Human rights in work of Ukrainian police”.

Every year experts of the Association analyze and generalize situation in human rights observance by Ukrainian police by providing integral image of human rights violations committed during a year. Such analysis results in a scientific edition “Human rights in work of Ukrainian police”, first published in 2008. Main focus of the edition is directed at analysis of observance of fundamental rights and freedoms, stated in the European Convention on Human Rights: topics of sections covered in the edition correspond to main articles of the Convention (right to life, prohibition of tortures, etc.). Analysis is based upon different sources of information – official statistics of the state power bodies, results of sociological studies, materials of the all-Ukrainian monitoring campaign “Police under control”, personal requests from people and massages in the media.

 

The most well known projects:

Reform of the law enforcement bodies: participation of the Association UMDPL

Where there is insufficient political will of the state administration to introduce systemic changes, experts – human rights activists, scholars, activists, started to restore public confidence in police and criminal justice system.  Public work group was established in March 2014. Its goal is to prepare and introduce public vision on the law enforcement reform in Ukraine. Work on the reform preparation and introduction is carried out within the initiative “Reanimation package of reforms” and is coordinated by the Association UMDPL together with a Center of Policy and Legal reform. Work group on law enforcement reformation unites the most famous experts in the field, authors of many normative documents, that have been already adopted and in force in the country, active participants of public control campaigns of law enforcement and practitioners.

Details of all developments can be found in a publication “Law enforcement reform in Ukraine: role of the public in reformation process”  (2015).

Cooperation with Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights – investigations

Since 2013 Association UMDPL has been developing and improving a public-parliament investigation mechanism regarding violation of the rights of vulnerable groups (PPI). The fact of the mechanism is that public representatives conduct public investigations of particular facts and systemic violations of those categories’ rights and transmit results to the Commissioner. If there are grounds, the Commissioner starts legal proceedings on the case of human rights violation, engages public experts, who later participate in the proceedings on the grounds of the Commissioner’s individual power of attorney. Reaction acts of the Commissioner, based on results of common public-parliament investigations, are sent to respective state bodies with a goal to eliminate detected violations and ensure effective official investigations.

An investigation film “On the crossroads” was presented in autumn 2015. The movie was dedicated to illegal brutality by law enforcement and penal service’s officers against drug addicts.

Cooperation with the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights– national preventive mechanism

National preventive mechanism (NPM) has been working in Ukraine since 2012 within a model ‘Ombudsman+’. Details on the mechanisms can be found on the web portal – http://www.npm.org.ua/.

More than two thirds of penal institutions in Ukraine are controlled by the National police of Ukraine and the State penitentiary service of Ukraine. Association UMDPL is specialized in work with law enforcement bodies, regularly increases NPM monitors’ level of knowledge in the field by ongoing trainings and consultations, it also publishes information materials for higher visits quality to such institutions, develops and supports operation of the electronic data base with all information on visits concentrated in the one place, what makes statistical data processing possible.