14 August, 2005ICEM News release No. 14/2004
The ICEM has condemned the brutal assault on a Ukrainian trade union leader's son, and is asking its 400 affiliated unions in 125 countries to protest in the strongest terms possible to the Ukrainian embassies in their home countries.
Ukrainian police grab Miners’ Union President
and member of Parliament Mikhail Volynets at
demonstration in front of a mine last year.
On the afternoon of 7 March, Andriy Volynets, the 24-year-old son of Miners' Independent Trade Union President Mikhail Volynets who is a member of Ukraine's Parliament, was abducted near his home in Kiev by two black-uniformed men in a van and over a period of six hours, was bludgeoned to near death.
Andriy Volynets is now in serious condition in a Kiev neurological hospital suffering from severe internal hemorrhaging and multiple concussions. The Miners' Union is an affiliate of the ICEM, and Mikhail Volynets is also president of the newly formed Confederation of Free Trade Unions (CFTU) of Ukraine.
Mikhail Volynets (right) speaks with ICFTU Gen. Sec.
Guy Ryder at the ICEM Congress last August.
(At center is CFTUU Intl Officer Ludmila Volynets)
The kidnapping and beating of young Volynets appear to be an act of political intimidation aimed at dissuading Mikhail Volynets of his support inside Ukraine's Rada to a coalition opposing the re-election of President Leonid Kuchma. Ukrainian elections are scheduled for October of this year.
ICEM General Secretary Fred Higgs has written directly to Kuchma about the incident with a copy of that letter to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations.
"Democracy will never take hold in Ukraine if these kind of cowardly deeds continue," stated the ICEM's Higgs. "We call on the Ukrainian government to thoroughly investigate this horrible crime, to apprehend and to prosecute fully the perpetrators who did this to Andriy Volynets.
"We also call on affiliates of the ICEM to respond in kind and to write the Ukrainian ambassadors in their home countries in protest of such a vicious act, and to encourage a full investigation and prosecution."
Andriy Volynets is an employee of a bank in Kiev and not involved in the political opposition. Mikhail Volynets told the ICEM that he clearly sees the beating as political retaliation aimed at him. He said that after a hospital doctor instructed him to leave his son's bedside to go out and get medicine in the early hours of 8 March, the police came to the hospital room to question the barely conscious Andriy.
The kidnapping and beating also came days after Volynets and the CFTU of Ukraine held a press conference laying out numerous acts of repression and violations of trade union rights by the government of Ukraine.