By Olivier Védrine
Director of the Jean Monnet Association (JMA)
More than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are being arbitrarily detained by Russia. The word that describes their fate, hostage, appears in a document signed on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1949.
Two weeks ago, the 140th session of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances was held at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. Among the names submitted was that of Oleg Shevandin, a European and world champion in wushu and kung fu, abducted in the Donetsk region in 2015 and detained for more than ten years.
Russia is holding him incommunicado, without contact with his family or the outside world, without legal assistance and without access for humanitarian missions.
There are more than 16,000 people like him, according to the unified register of the Ukrainian Ombudsman, cited before the UN Security Council last August. They include journalists, athletes, teachers who refused to take part in Russian programmes, mayors and local elected officials, and priests. They are neither combatants nor convicted criminals: They are civilians taken because they represented civil society.
The word used to describe them is not a figure of speech. The Fourth Geneva Convention, signed here in 1949, prohibits the taking of hostages under Article 34; the 1979 International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages defines hostage-taking as the seizure or detention of a person in order to compel a third party to act, while the Rome Statute classifies hostage-taking as a war crime.
Geneva gave its name to this body of international law. Today, that law is being emptied of its substance.
No established exchange mechanism covers these civilians. Prisoners of war return by the hundreds; civilian hostages almost never do.
Cut off from the world, beaten, tortured and often deprived of medical care, they disappear from public conversation. That is precisely the intended effect. Erasing someone begins by silencing their name.
Hence a modest but persistent response: a city sponsorship initiative.
Under the initiative, a city formally takes up the cases of two civilian hostages, with the written consent of their families, calls for their release, publicly displays their photographs and writes to the relevant authorities. The campaign has been launched in more than 60 cities across France and Belgium, around twenty of which have already given their agreement in principle. Lyon was due to consider the initiative on 24 September, with Paris following in October. The gesture costs little from a city budget, yet it commits something essential: it places a person’s name in an official resolution and, by doing so, preserves that name in the public record.
We are proposing that the City of Geneva sponsor two civilian hostages. For centuries, Geneva has been a city of refuge for the persecuted. Asylum can also take the form of a name spoken publicly. It can mean being a city that refuses to allow a human being to be erased in silence 3,000 kilometres away, and that says so in its own name.
More information on the campaign is available through Pour l’Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nôtre!
Source and authorship note
This article was originally published in French by the Swiss newspaper Tribune de Genève under the title “Une ville pour sauver une vie.” It was written by Olivier Védrine, Director of the Jean Monnet Association (JMA), together with Pierre Raiman, vice-president of Pour l’Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nôtre! and organiser of the “Sauvons les otages ukrainiens” (Save the Ukrainian Hostages) campaign, and Lora Shevandina, president of the Ukrainian movement Return Freedom and wife of Ukrainian civilian hostage Oleg Shevandin.
Original source: Tribune de Genève – “Une ville pour sauver une vie”
Campaign information: Pour l’Ukraine, pour leur liberté et la nôtre! – Genève: otages civils ukrainiens
Translated from the original French for CIVIL Today, with light editorial adaptation for clarity and readability while faithfully preserving the meaning, tone, and substance of the original.
IF YOU VALUE CIVIL’S WORK, SUPPORT IT. YES, YOU.
Your support helps us report independently, sustain democratic dialogue, expose disinformation and hybrid threats, and defend human rights and freedom of expression.
Support for independent journalism starts with you.
