On May 23, Olga Karach, head of the ICCI “Our House”, took part in a working group session on women’s rights at the OSCE. For the first time, the meeting addressed the problems of Belarusian women who found themselves in Ukraine at the time of the military aggression of the Russian Federation.

The meeting was attended by representatives of organisations from different countries that deal with women’s rights.

Olga Karach spoke about the issues faced by Belarusian women in Ukraine who first fled terror and repression in their own country and then found themselves in the middle of military action. This group of women is virtually ignored.

The OSCE is currently conducting some serious monitoring of the situation of women in Ukraine, so it is significant for us to pay attention to Belarusian women, as the main target group for our analysis is Ukrainian women. And numerous groups of women who are not the ethnic population of Ukraine remain in the invisible zone.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it is unknown how many women who fled repression from Belarus are in Ukraine right now. We don’t know how many may have been subjected to violence by Russian aggressors and how many such women may have been captured, taken away by force to Russia.

At the end of the meeting, concrete steps were agreed upon which would ensure that this issue would receive special attention and that Belarusians and their problems would come out of the invisible zone of international human rights organisations.

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