Council of Europe Rapporteur Says Laws Not to Blame for Infants’ Disappearance

On September 1 General Gennadiy Moskal, Deputy Minister of Ukraine for Internal Affairs, assured the PACE delegation investigating the alleged disappearance of newborns from Kharkiv’s maternity hospital No. 6 that none of the facts of infant abductions in Ukraine’s hospitals have been confirmed. According to Gen. Moskal, police authorities received only two kidnapping complaints in 2002 and 2003, but both of them were unfounded. Suspicions cropped up when doctors refused to show mothers their allegedly stillborn babies and allow them to bury them. The cause of this kind of misunderstanding is the flawed law, which states that a stillborn baby should be buried by the medical institution where s/he was born, Gen. Moskal emphasized. He added that even local authorities cannot allow the parents of such babies to remove their bodies for burial because stillborn children are not recorded anywhere and thus legally do not exist. Gen. Moskal thinks this problem should be solved by amending the law and granting mothers the right to see (and perhaps bury) their stillborn babies. The deputy minister also said this would be not just “humane” but would also help forestall this kind of problem in the future. Last March the Ministry of Internal Affairs established a special squad to combat human trafficking, which is also helping to prevent the kinds of phenomena that have alarmed European observers.

PACE rapporteur Ruth Gaby Vermot-Mangold believes that the case of infant disappearances in Kharkiv should be reopened. She will be going public with the results of her own inquiry in a few days, Interfax-Ukraine reports. During her talks with Yuriy Pavlenko, Minister for Family, Youth and Sport Affairs, the PACE rapporteur said that the assembly intends to help Ukraine combat baby trafficking. “The Council of Europe is going to fully support Ukraine in combating illegal trafficking in children and embryos, as well as unlawful parenting, and I think this is the purpose of my visit,” Ms. Vermot-Mangold noted. She promised there would be no sanctions against Ukraine.