Mr. Chair,
First, let me express my deepest condolences to Türkiye after the school shootings.
Mr Chair.
This April marks four years since the Russian Federation illegally detained three of our colleagues. Maxim Petrov, Dmytro Shabanov and Vadym Golda.
These were not private individuals caught in some legal dispute. They were members of an OSCE mission mandated by all participating States. By ignoring their status and staging illegitimate proceedings against them, Russia is not only mistreating three colleagues. It is showing contempt for this Organization and for the commitments it claims to uphold.
But we should also be clear. This is not an isolated case. The 2024 Moscow Mechanism report showed that arbitrary detention of Ukrainian civilians is a defining feature of Russia’s policy in the temporarily occupied territories. It documented torture, incommunicado detention, grave mistreatment, and recorded cases of extrajudicial killings.
We also recognise that this pattern does not stop at the line of occupation. Inside the Russian Federation itself, dissidents, human rights defenders, civil society actors, independent journalists, and critics of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine are being prosecuted and detained on political grounds.
Mr Chair, Russia cannot invoke Helsinki in Vienna while erasing it in occupied territory. When law is used not to protect people but to break them, the issue is no longer procedure. It is abuse. We ask Russia again to release all politically detained prisoners now.