Twenty days after the launch of Russia – Wide human rights campaign of the Committee against Torture “Law enforcement agent, remember your Oath of Hounour”, related to the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Ufa City Administration at last consented to place the information boards in the streets of the city. Such a valiant decision was made by the Mayor of Ufa, Irek Yalalov.
(Ufa)
The campaign was launched on 1 June 2013. As the initiators of the campaign so intended, information boards with quotations from the Oath of Honour of law enforcement agents with the police, the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor’s Office are to remind them and all the citizens that they have solemnly sworn to faithfully uphold the Constitution and defend human rights and freedoms. Unfortunately, in only two of the regions where the Committee has regional branches, we managed to receive permission to place these information boards: in Nizhny Novgorod and Orenburg.
The situation in Bashkortostan was developing as follows. On 15 May 2013 the INGO “Committee against Torture and LLC RG “Virtuos” signed an agreement on placing the information boards in the city centre. But on May 20 the advertising company was honest enough to explain, that permission to place information boards of the kind was not granted by the Head of the City Administration Press Office, Askar Fazlyev. He, in his turn, suggested that we should replace the text “Law enforcement agent, remember your Oath of Honour” with his variant “Law enforcement agent, we believe you to remember your Oath of Honour”. But in the end, even this variant didn’t do.
Later Mr. Fazlyev commented on his original position in his interview to “Kommersant”: “those young people just applied to me for consultation, and I shared with them my expert opinion that it was though bright, but a dubious thing. After that they made decisions themselves”.
The Mayor of Ufa Irek Yalalov, who must have found nothing dubious in the Law Enforcement Oath of Honour, appeared to disagree with his subordinates. In the end, the Acting Head of Bashkortostan regional branch of the INGO “Committee against Torture” Oleg Golovko, after many days of “siege” of the City Administration, managed to wear the officials down – and the information boards were at last placed.
As for Yoshkar-Ola, the stands for information boards that were unexpectedly needed for some urgent public service advertising are still displaying nothing.
We are determined to appeal against this unlawful act of the advertising agents and the authorities of the city.