On 2 March, Malmö University was visited by Oleksandra Romantsova, director of the Ukrainian civil rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 for its work for human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence in Ukraine.

Oleksandra Romantsova and Vice-Chancellor Kerstin Tham.

The Centre for Civil Liberties (CCL) was founded in Kyiv in 2007 to promote human rights and democracy in Ukraine, working to strengthen the Ukrainian civil society and press the authorities to make Ukraine a full-fledged democracy. As part of Ukraine's development into a constitutional democracy, CCL advocates the accession of Ukraine to the International Criminal Court.

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, CCL has engaged in efforts to identify and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population.

"Sweden can help by collecting testimonies of war crimes from the Ukrainians fleeing to Sweden", says Oleksandra Romantsova.

During her visit to Malmö University, she met with teachers, students and representatives of University management. In Orkanen, she held an open lecture with the title 'Can human rights protect people from war in Ukraine?', discussing human rights issues:

Human rights were created as a system to prevent war. For this purpose, documents, mechanisms and goals of the organisation were created. But what went wrong? Why did a member state of the Council of Europe, OSCE and UN Security Council, Russi, attack another member state of these organisations, Ukraine? Why does the president of the Russian 'young democracy' claim that the neighboring people, their culture and state do not exist — and that these ideas have wide support among the population of the Russian Federation? And how did it happen that defending human rights in Ukraine meant the protection of democratic values in all of Europe? 

The lecture highlighted the aspects that influenced the possibility of creating such a reality and outlined the prospects for the development of human rights protection in the future.

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