Nils Muiznieks, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe, has told Russia’s Kommersant that he hopes to visit separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine at the end of June.

Muiznieks visited occupied Crimea in September last year. Kommersant‘s Pavel Tarasenko asked him, in an interview published today, whether he planned to return to the peninsula.

The Interpreter translates:

I’m trying to do this. The Russian authorities assisted me in my work in September and I expect that they would do this again. But they weren’t happy with my report in Moscow, they didn’t consider it to be balanced enough. I have to return and find out to what extent my analysis was accurate. But my first priority now is to go to eastern Ukraine, to territories controlled by the separatists. I hope to be able to do this at the end of June.

Muiznieks’s report, published on October 27 last year, was extremely critical of the human rights situation in Crimea since the Russian occupation. The report can be read in full here.

Muiznieks told Tarasenko that

Since the time of my visit to Crimea I have seen a deterioration of the situation in all the spheres I studied. For example, I don’t see any results of investigations into politically motivated killings and the disappearances. The pressure on members of minorities (especially on the Crimean Tatars), the media and human rights defenders continues.

Tarasenko asked the Commissioner for his estimation of the human rights situation in Ukraine. Muiznieks replied that the killings of opposition journalists and politicians were a cause of “great concern” for the Commission.

He said that the authorities must conduct effective investigations into not only these deaths, but the killings during the Maidan protests and the Odessa clashes. However Muiznieks stressed that while the Ukrainian investigative authorities “must be completely reformed,” it was difficult to carry out such reforms during a time of war.

When asked about the human rights situation in Russia, Muiznieks replied:

My worst fears have come true with regards to the legislation on foreign agents. We have counted more than 210 NGOs, which have been negatively affected by the new rules, in the form, for example, of fines and warnings. The scale of freedom of expression is worrying. Initiatives prohibiting any critical analysis of the situation with Crimea are disturbing. Furthermore, there is Lugovoi’s law, which allows the blocking of sites without a court order, as well as the bloggers’ law that demands that the most popular of them are registered as mass media. Meanwhile, they do not have the same protection afforded to the media. We continue to be concerned by the situation in the North Caucasus, especially with regards to gender equality.

— Pierre Vaux