International Human Rights Day (December 12, 2014)

This year, the Crimean Tatars are not allowed to meet on occasion of the Human Rights Day. On Tuesday, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) reported that the pro-Russian leadership issued a ban on public assembly for the Crimean Tatars on December 10 – just as on May 18, the Memorial Day of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars. "This ban is a clear violation of the freedom of assembly and a scandalous attempt to silence the Crimean Tatars," criticized the STP's Secretary General, Tilman Zülch. He emphasized that the STP will now publish the Crimean Tatars' call to respect their human rights and the freedom of assembly, expression and freedom of travel – as well as their call to investigate crimes and punish perpetrators. To ensure that they will be heard, the demands will also be sent to the Russian President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, prior to the Russian annexation of the Crimea, there had been a regular meeting of Crimean Tatars in Simferopol on occasion of the Human Rights Day to pass a resolution to defend their rights.

In the letter to Putin, the STP accuses the President of ignoring his promises to the Crimean Tatars. On March 18, he had promised that the members of the minority group would be safe and that their rights would be respected. The rulers of Crimea had passed an act concerning the Crimean Tatars and their integration into the Crimean community, but the provisions are not kept.

On the contrary: the Crimean Tatars have become victims of serious human rights violations, including killings, disappearances, arbitrary justice, intimidation and travel bans against two of the most important Crimean Tatar politicians. There were searches of Mosques, schools and private homes – and the self-representative body of the Crimean Tatars, the Majlis, was systematically incapacitated. In raids that are targeted at people with a "non-Slavic appearance" (often Crimean Tatars), people are checked and fingerprinted to create a climate of fear among the non-Russian population. Crimean Tatar media are harassed and threatened with closure. There are restrictions concerning school lessons in Ukrainian and the Tatar language – and thousands of businesses and stretches of land belonging to Crimean Tatars were "nationalized", which means that they were expropriated without compensation.

With about 300.000 members, the population group of the Crimean Tatars makes up almost 15 percent of the population on the Crimea. On May 18, 1944, Stalin had deported all Crimean Tatars to Central Asia. Up to 44 percent of the deportees died. Their houses were torn down and their cemeteries were dug up. It was not until the late 1980s that the Crimean Tatars were allowed to move back to their traditional homeland.

You can download the full resolution (in German) here.