NGOs point at unlawfulness of suspending social payments to IDPs before check of recipients
KYIV. March 11 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are indignant that before inspections to reveal possible frauds with receiving social payments by the the internally displaced people (IDPs) the lists that are used to automatically suspend payment of the targeted monetary assistance to IDPs and any other social payments were drawn up.
"We heard about the situation from people who unofficially were put on these lists. There were no official reports that this procedure would be applied, and we learnt about it post factum. We've learnt that there are lists that have been drawn up using unknown criteria and people who permanently live on the territory that is under control of Ukraine were included in the lists," Donbas-SOS NGO coordinator Olha Hvozdieva said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday.
She said that people who never went to the uncontrolled territory from the places where they live now come to NGOs with this problem. Some of them even do not have the permit to pass the contact line.
Hvozdieva said that after the refusal to pay social aid, the social security departments started 'inventing' own mechanisms how citizens can confirm the fact that they live on the territory that is under control of the Ukrainian government. She said that the IDP certificate and the passport were not enough, and they started demanding to bring neighbors, certificates from the places of work, kindergartens. Two weeks later authorities gave official explanations, but violation of law is still seen in local departments.
Coordinator of the All-Ukrainian Charitable Foundation the Right to Protection Olena Vynohradova said that the social payment suspension procedure is not foreseen in any legal act. She advises that IDPs register the communication with the social security departments in the written form.
She said that the first step is to be obtaining information if persons for whom payments are suspended are included in the lists, and then wait for the official response why the citizens were put on the lists. An application to restore payments should be submitted and this document could be used in court.
Vynohradova said that as for the pensions, IDPs should go to the Pension Fund, as the Pension Fund has suspended payments of pensions not only to pensioners from the SBU's lists, but to all IDPs.
Coordinator of Vostok-SOS civil volunteer initiative Oleksandra Dvoretska has proposed that people who have social payments as the only source of financing to implement various demands put forward by authorities and then challenge their unlawful actions in court.
She is indignant that in fact the Social Policy Ministry named hundreds of thousands Ukrainian citizens 'cheaters' and this could be done only after a court ruling.
"It turns out that no one in Ukraine, apart from Social Policy Minister Pavlo Rozenko, believes in existence of so-called LPR and DPR, and he makes people who live there residents of some so-called states and not victims of the military aggression of the Russian Federation," she said.
Dvoretska said that if the minister speaks about 'double payments' to Ukrainian citizens who live on the occupied territories of Donbas this looks like the recognition of the pension system of DPR and LPR.
She also said that activists believe that payments to IDPs who returned to live to the uncontrolled territories must be paid, but this does not concern the rest of social payments guaranteed by law.
Coordinator of the Opora civil network Oleksandr Kliuzhev said that the state worsens its opportunities of being the winner in the negotiations process and the conflict in Donbas via making these decisions.
He said that it is unclear how 'fake' IDPs are detected.
"If a person lives in Lviv for two months and two months in Luhansk, is he a fake IDP or not? There are thousands of such people," he said.