Strasbourg, 10.10.2008 – The Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, will pay a one-week high-level official visit to Serbia from 13 until 17 October 2008. The Commissioner's visit will assess the country's human rights framework against its implementation and relevance in practice.
Covering a broad range of human rights areas, Mr Hammarberg's agenda will particularly focus on the state of rule of law including functioning of the judiciary, police behaviour, torture and ill-treatment, freedom of expression and of the media, minorities with a particular focus on the Roma minority, as well as a wide range of non-discrimination issues.
Besides Belgrade, the Commissioner's agenda includes visits to the Sandzak region and the autonomous province of Vojvodina. With a view to getting first-hand, on-the-spot impressions of respect for individuals' human rights, on-site visits to institutions with human rights relevance will be carried out nationwide to police stations, detention centres, refugee camps, shelters for children and women as well as psychiatric institutions and social care homes.
Rounding up the visit, the Commissioner will meet the country's top State executives including the heads of state and government as well as the ministers of Justice, Interior, Labour, Health and Education. Further talks will include the Speaker of Parliament, parliamentary groups, the Ombudsman, as well as representatives of relevant state agencies and local authorities. The Commissioner will also meet with representatives of leading international governmental and non-governmental organisations and the country's civil society opinion leaders.
The Commissioner's preliminary observations will be presented on Thursday, 16 October at 14h00 during a press conference organised in Belgrade at the Media Centre (Milentija Popovica 9, objekat A, II sprat, 11070 Novi Beograd; tel: +381 11 220-6919; www.mediacenter.org.yu).
The visit is part of the activities carried out in accordance with the Commissioner's mandate to assess the implementation of human rights commitments by all Council of Europe member states. An assessment report with relevant recommendations will be published early 2009.