After deoccupation of Crimea, all political prisoners to be released - envoy

All political prisoners held on trumped-up charges by Russian occupiers will be released without any case review.

This was stated by Tamila Tasheva, the Ukrainian President’s envoy for the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, who penned an oped for the Ukrainian Pravda online newspaper, Ukrinform reports.

She noted that since the occupation, Russian-controlled courts have been actively operating on the peninsula, handing down illegitimate sentences to Ukrainian citizens in falsified cases. Each judgment will have to be reviewed individually to achieve justice for our people.

"Ahead lies the procedure, sequence, and priority of review. First of all, it will be about the cases in which human rights violations were recorded, and those in which the occupation administrations were one of the parties. It is obvious that all our political prisoners, who are held in places of detention under falsified accusations by the occupiers, under sentences by puppet courts, will be released even without case review," Tasheva said.

According to the official, it is already necessary to form a personnel reserve for judicial bodies that will operate on the peninsula once it is liberated.

As Ukrinform reported earlier, referring to the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets, out of 180 Crimean political prisoners held by the Kremlin, 18 people have any procedural status, which shows Russia's contempt for international humanitarian law.