On October 7, Oleksandra Romantsova was in Warsaw, her dog and her luggage by her side, when her phone rang. “I inform you that in one hour we will announce that you are the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize,” said a voice on the phone. Stunned, the thirty-year-old loses her words. “My English went out of my head,” recalls the executive director of the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, giggling. “OK… that’s great”, she managed to stammer before being carried away by the excitement and bursting into tears.
A few months later, Oleksandra Romantsova fondly remembers the moment when the light shone on her work. “In Ukraine, we just work, work, work, because the choice is simple: if no bomb hits you, you continue what you are doing and you document, she explains in an interview with the Duty. But that moment when you realize you’re in the dark, but someone sees you and sees your work, that’s an important moment. »
In a clear criticism of the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 rewarded the work of civil society actors – both in Ukraine and in Russia and Belarus – who stood up to “criticize the power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens”. The Kyiv Center for Civil Liberties thus shared the prestigious prize with the Russian organization Memorial, which documented human rights violations in the USSR, then in Russia, before being forced to cease its activities in 2021, and with Belarusian pro-democracy activist Ales Bialiatski, founder of the Viasna organization, currently imprisoned in Belarus.
It is more particularly the project of mobile observation of human rights violations and war crimes in eastern Ukraine and political repression in Crimea, set up by Oleksandra Romantsova, which retained the attention of the jury. Under the leadership of the young woman, the Center for Civil Liberties was the first organization to send teams to the field in 2014 to document the abuses committed by pro-Russian forces.
Document
The first caravan, “it was me with journalists in my two cars”, recalls Oleksandra Romantsova through the camera of her computer. An epic which first led them to Sloviansk, in the Donbass, four days after Ukrainian troops retook the city from the hands of pro-Russian separatists. “We filmed and made videos of what we saw,” she explains. We tried to find the places where people had been detained. We found four. Then, over the months and thanks to the hard work of many volunteers, a map listing 87 places of illegal detention in the Donbass was drawn up.
At the same time, the Center carried out a campaign to document political repression in Crimea and demand the release of political prisoners, with as a focal point the case of Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov, arrested and then sent to a penal colony in Siberia before being released in 2019.
I feel that human rights are what guide my values on a daily basis. That’s why I want to spread them everywhere.
Based on this experience on the ground, the Center for Civil Liberties launched, after the large-scale Russian invasion launched last February, the coalition A court for Putin. “The main objective is to document possible war crimes, crimes against humanity and episodes of genocide”, explains Oleksandra Romantsova. Around 30 organisations, covering the entire Ukrainian territory, are taking part in the initiative. “Each event listed must be confirmed by three different sources,” said the young woman, and evidence in the form of testimonials, photos or videos must be provided.
A habit
A difficult but essential task, carried out in the field by hundreds of volunteers trained by the organization. “We try to involve as many people as possible, so that defending human rights becomes a habit,” says the Ukrainian. Because beyond understanding the concept, “you have to understand what it is, defending human rights with your own hands,” she insists.
A sting for the defense of human rights that Oleksandra Romantsova herself had in 2013, when the demonstrations of the Euromaidan movement were strongly suppressed. The Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych had just scuttled an association agreement with the European Union to sign an agreement with Russia, which had set the country ablaze.
“I felt that I had to find a way to contribute to this movement”, explains the one who worked at the time in a bank. Evening after evening, she therefore offered her time to a telephone line (hotline), deployed by the Center for Civil Liberties, whose objective was to connect protesters with lawyers ready to help them in their run-ins with the law.
Daily Values
Then, quickly, the young woman decided to abandon the career that was taking shape before her in the banking world. “I went to see Oleksandra Matviïtchouk, who heads the Center for Civil Liberties, to tell her that I wanted to work with her,” she recalls. But no position was available. At his insistence, the director of the Center suggested that he fill out grant applications to obtain funding that would allow him to be hired.
A proposal that Oleksandra Romantsova took up and which was crowned with success when she obtained funds from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to launch the mobile observation project. “I had understood that people were no longer calling the telephone line for Euromaidan, but rather to denounce what was happening in the Donbass and in Crimea,” she says. With the sequel that we know.
For Oleksandra Romantsova, injection has thus become a vocation. “I feel that human rights are what guide my values on a daily basis,” she says. That’s why I want to spread them everywhere. I am a dealer of human rights. »