KYIV – A graduation ceremony of new Kyiv patrol police officers trained with the support of the project coordinator in Ukraine of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was held here on July 2.
According to the official website of the government of Ukraine, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk presented certificates to the graduates and greeted them by saying: “Millions of Ukrainians have hope in you. And each of you will take an oath of loyalty to the Ukrainian nation. You are the new face of Ukraine. You are the new Ukrainian police. You are also the representatives of our new European Ukraine.”
The police training focused on enhancing recruits’ knowledge and skills in addressing human trafficking and domestic violence issues. Particular attention was paid to cooperation with local communities, as well as to identification and response to human trafficking and domestic violence crimes as part of routine duties. Increased risks of human trafficking and domestic violence manifestation brought on by the current situation in Ukraine were also discussed with the course participants.
The establishment of the new patrol police in the Ukrainian capital, initiated in January by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, is the first step in the country-wide police reform. Over 33,000 persons – 35 percent of them women – applied and undertook tests to evaluate their general and individual skills, as well as health and physical abilities. As a result of the selection, about 2,000 recruits underwent initial training courses between April and June.
“We are going step by step in developing police reform in Ukraine,” said Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs. “We plan to train about 6,000 new police officers by the end of the year, but the need is much higher – about 170,000 police officers require re-training country-wide.”
“The public should possess the right and means to assess police performance, and openness to public scrutiny should be a key pre-requisite of democratic policing,” said Ambassador Vaidotas Verba, OSCE project coordinator in Ukraine. “This approach was unequivocally supported by the OSCE participating states in Copenhagen in 1990, and should constitute a key element of any national police reform strategy developed and implemented in the OSCE region.”
The training is part of a project aimed at strengthening the capacity of Ukrainian institutions for gender mainstreaming and addressing gender-based violence more effectively.
With information from the web portal of the Ukrainian government.