During 2019 presidential election, representatives of Civil Network OPORA trained 1533 prevention police officers and investigators from the National Police of Ukraine. We are planning to conduct trainings in all regions for the same number of police officers before parliamentary elections.

On May 14, a final meeting was held with OPORA trainers who trained police officers during the presidential election campaign.

"Our goal on today's meeting is to summarize the experience of trainers. They will tell us what worked and what didn't. This way, we will improve our training program and methodology materials handed to police officers before parliamentary elections,"- said Director of the Efficient Police Guaranteeing Legitimate Electoral Process Project Andrii Tokarskyi.

 

According to the trainers, trained police officers have a high level of knowledge and interest in detecting and classifying violations.

"These trainings are very important for police officers. They gave a systematized knowledge, necessary to detect electoral crimes and work efficiently afterwards. We saw during the training that police is ready to detect these violations, there is a political will to do this, but they lack some basic knowledge. In some cases, definition of an electoral subject is the problem, in other, criminalization of violations. Thanks to these trainings, regional representatives will be able to detect these violations and have more efficient court practices. Besides that, they learned how to report them correctly and have some ground to work on."- OPORA's trainer Oleksii Kormiletskyi said.

"I trained officers in Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Odesa, and Mykolaiv. I would like to say that police, investigators, and prevention officers are well-trained. There were a lot of practical questions. Many on them concerned classification of crimes, as long as criminal articles change when the legislation is being changed. In Ternopil, I was asked to conduct an additional training for the prevention police. 50 people attended the training. All of them came from regions. People are interested, and it great," - trainer Olha Mazaieva added.

OPORA's representatives also said that police officers held stayed in touch with trainers after trainings.  

"Many policemen who participated in trainings, called and consulted concerning one or another situation, asked how to work more effectively. This is, I believe, a positive result of our work. We now expect how efficiently investigators will investigate cases, which evidence base was collected during the presidential election," - Andrii Tokarskyi said.

On the eve of parliamentary elections, OPORA trainers plan to train around 1.5 thousand policemen. Trainings will be held in August in all regions of Ukraine.

Note: This initiative is realized by Civil Network OPORA All-Ukrainian NGO under project “Strengthening legislative and electoral processes through an increased citizen engagement and technical assistance”, implemented by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) and British assistance from the UK Government. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of British Government.

For comment, please contact:

Andrii Tokarskyi, Director of the Efficient Police Guaranteeing Legitimate Electoral Process Project at Civil Network OPORA

Tel.: +380636179693

e-mail: [email protected]