Ukraine: EU backs donation by International Commission on Missing Persons

The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has announced a donation of material and equipment to the value of €225,000 to support efforts to account for missing persons from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This donation was made possible thanks to the financial support of the European Union’s Foreign Policy Instruments Service (FPI) and the US Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Rights and Labour (DRL).

The donation will facilitate the application of state-of-the-art DNA human identification techniques and is consistent with the ICMP’s recent signing of cooperation agreements with the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine.

Mykola Shevchuk, the Head of the Lviv Oblast Rada Communal Enterprise of the Lviv Oblast Bureau of Forensic Expertise, said that cooperation with ICMP would help the bureau to optimise processes related to forensic molecular genetic examination of both physical evidence and biomaterials.

“Consequently, it will expedite the provision of answers to questions about the fate of deceased or missing relatives for numerous families, thereby offering them swifter resolution and closure,” Mykola Shevchuk said.

The ICMP is an intergovernmental organisation with its headquarters in The Hague. Its mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and others in locating missing persons from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organised crime, irregular migration and other causes, and to assist them in doing so.

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