On 10 December, the world marks Human Rights Day. It was on this date in 1948 that the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the international community became fully aware of the consequences of the horrific crimes and widespread human rights violations committed during the conflict. Humanity urgently required mechanisms to safeguard human rights and prevent such atrocities from ever recurring.

The Declaration became a universal human rights instrument that laid the foundation for the modern international system of human rights protection

77 years later, Russia has brought back to the European continent atrocities unseen since the Second World War. Throughout its years of aggression against Ukraine, it has violated every fundamental principle enshrined in the Universal Declaration, the European Convention on Human Rights, and other international legal instruments.

Human rights violations committed by the aggressor state have persisted in Ukraine since 2014, when the Russian Federation occupied Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. With the launch of Russia’s full-scale armed aggression against Ukraine on 24 February 2022, systematic violations of human rights and the suppression of fundamental freedoms -among them unlawful arrests, enforced disappearances, killings, rape, torture, public executions, the abduction and deportation of children, and the denial of the rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression - spread to other Ukrainian territories temporarily occupied by Russia. These facts have been documented by numerous independent monitoring mechanisms, including the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, reports of experts under the OSCE Moscow Mechanism and ODIHR, and others.

As of 8 December 2025, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine has registered 204 595 crimes of aggression and war crimes committed by Russia as the aggressor state.

Russia’s violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as of international humanitarian law, pose a serious threat to the effective functioning of the international human rights protection system. We are convinced that only collective international efforts—aimed at strengthening the capacity to respond, prevent, and ensure accountability—can counter this threat.

Russia must immediately cease its systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity, and grave violations of civil, political, linguistic, cultural, religious, and other rights in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, as well as its unlawful detention and persecution of Ukrainian citizens.

We call on the international community to intensify its consolidated pressure on Russia to ensure that it immediately halts its crimes and human rights violations, releases all Ukrainian citizens unlawfully deprived of their liberty, and returns home all Ukrainian children who have been forcibly displaced or deported.