Тренінги
ЗМІ
At the initiative of the Agency for the Resilience of Culture (ACURE), a press conference was held at Ukraine Crisis Media Center to summarize the results of the International Training “Collection and Research of Evidence of Crimes against Cultural Heritage”.
The four-day training brought together more than 20 participants from 9 regions of Ukraine, including frontline territories and regions suffering from shelling: museum workers, documenters, investigators, prosecutors, military, academics, representatives of the public sector and journalists.
During the training, experts from 7 countries - the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Mauritius, the Netherlands, and Ukraine - shared their experience and best practices, including prosecutors who have worked with the International Criminal Court on crimes against cultural heritage in Mali, Bosnia, and other countries.
According to Ihor Poshyvailo, co-founder of the Agency for Cultural Resilience (ACURE), Director General of the National Museum of the Revolution of Dignity, the purpose of the training was to coordinate horizontally and vertically those initiative groups of experts working in Ukraine to collect information on violations against cultural heritage due to the armed aggression of the Russian Federation.
“The ultimate goal is, of course, to bring to justice those responsible for crimes in Ukraine, including those against culture, cultural identity, and historical memory,” emphasized Ihor Poshyvailo.
Anton Drobovych, an expert in the field of culture and politics of memory, head of the Center for Human Rights and War Memorialization at the Kyiv School of Economics, noted that the training helped participants learn how the efforts of national jurisdictions and various national actors can be correlated with international ones.
"We have gained an understanding of the legal and conceptual field. How it works in the world, how international major players, courts, instances, commissions, groups, large international NGOs work, collecting evidence, how they interact," emphasized Anton Drobovych.
Romana Delaporte, project coordinator at Cultural Emergency Response (CER), noted the importance of the fact that the organizer of the training managed to bring together representatives of civil society working in the cultural sphere, the Office of the Attorney General, representatives of military administrations, and international experts with vast knowledge and experience.
"We have done a lot by bringing these specialists together under one roof. The training showed cross-sectoral cooperation. We learned how other sectors work and how we can cooperate," said the project coordinator at Cultural Emergency Response (CER).
Andrea Caley, Head of the Cultural Heritage Group, spoke about the work of the Advisory Group on War Crimes in Ukraine (ACA). Evelyn Kampfens, a lawyer in the field of art and cultural heritage law at the University of Amsterdam, drew attention to the need to inventory damaged cultural heritage.
"If you want to prosecute a crime, you need to understand what you already have. In this matter of inventory, I think a lot has already been done or is being done in Ukraine. There is a register of damaged and destroyed property, online museums. All this is needed to be able to measure. If you don't know what you have, you don't know what you have lost," she explained.
The training “Collecting and Researching Evidence Against Cultural Heritage” was organized by the Agency for Cultural Resilience (ACURE) and the Maidan Museum in cooperation with the Atrocities Crime Advisory Group for Ukraine (ACA - ICJI) and implemented with the support of the Swedish Institute, Cultural Heritage without Borders (CHwB), Cultural Emergency Response (CER) and DutchCulture.
Original article and video broadcast of the event and photos on the website of Ukraine Crisis Media Center
