The Lawyers Who Record a War: The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group

By Matthew Parish

Monday 12 October 2026

There is something peculiarly appropriate about one of Ukraine’s oldest human rights organisations being based in Kharkiv. This is a city in which questions that elsewhere belong to law books and university seminars have acquired an uncomfortable physical reality. What is arbitrary detention? What constitutes torture? What obligations does a state owe to civilians? How does one prove a war crime? What does justice mean when the suspected perpetrator is somewhere beyond the reach of the court? For the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, these are no longer principally theoretical questions. They arrive in the form of people.

The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, generally known by its English initials KHPG, traces its origins to the Soviet dissident movement of the 1970s and 1980s. From 1988 it operated as the Kharkiv branch of Memorial, the celebrated movement dedicated to exposing Soviet political repression and preserving the memory of its victims. KHPG became a separate legal entity in November 1992, less than a year after Ukraine regained its independence.

That history matters, because human rights organisations in western Europe can sometimes appear to inhabit a rather comfortable world of conferences, policy papers and carefully drafted recommendations. KHPG comes from an altogether harsher tradition. Its intellectual ancestors were concerned with political prisoners, psychiatric abuse, censorship, arbitrary state power and the machinery by which authoritarian governments make inconvenient people disappear.

For much of independent Ukraine’s history, KHPG consequently performed the conventional but essential functions of a human rights organisation in a young democracy. It provided free legal assistance, represented people whose rights had been violated and pursued strategic litigation. Tens of thousands of people have approached the organisation for advice and assistance over its lifetime, while KHPG has also pursued extensive litigation before the European Court of Human Rights. Then came war.

From human rights to war crimes

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine did not begin in February 2022, of course, and neither did KHPG’s documentation of it. The organisation had already acquired extensive experience of examining abuses arising from the conflict in eastern Ukraine after 2014, but the full-scale invasion changed both the scale of the task and the nature of its everyday work.

Within weeks of the beginning of the full-scale invasion, KHPG was systematically documenting alleged international crimes in Kharkiv Region. Investigators assembled information from official reports, international organisations, witnesses, photographs, videos, social media and other open sources. Events were given locations and dates, supporting material was preserved, and incidents were entered into databases structured around potential classifications under international criminal law.

This may sound dry, but it is supposed to. The fundamental problem with recording atrocities is that outrage is not evidence. A photograph may be horrifying but prove little unless one can establish where and when it was taken. A witness may remember terrible events, but memory needs to be recorded carefully and corroborated wherever possible. Two accounts may describe the same incident, while a building may have been destroyed but the circumstances of its destruction may initially remain uncertain.

The transition from human suffering to admissible evidence therefore requires painstaking work. Dates, places, names, photographs, witness accounts, medical examinations and documentary records have to be assembled into something capable of surviving the scrutiny of investigators, prosecutors and, ultimately, judges. This is one of the less visible dimensions of the war in Ukraine. Alongside the soldiers fighting it, doctors treating its casualties and emergency workers pulling people from destroyed buildings, there is another profession working quietly in the background: people creating the evidential memory of the war.

A war measured in files

In March 2022, KHPG joined the Centre for Civil Liberties and the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union in launching the Tribunal for Putin initiative, usually abbreviated to T4P. The network subsequently expanded to encompass dozens of organisations documenting alleged crimes potentially falling within the definitions contained in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The resulting numbers are almost impossible to comprehend, and that is itself one of the problems with a prolonged war. Ten deaths are ten human beings, while ten thousand become a statistic. A destroyed house is a family catastrophe; thousands of destroyed buildings become a line in a report. Human consciousness is poorly equipped to comprehend suffering once it reaches industrial proportions.

KHPG’s work is, in part, an attempt to reverse that process. Behind the database entry there must remain an event, and behind the event there may be a victim. Behind the victim there is a name. This is why documentation matters even when prosecution appears distant. Wars produce propaganda, mythology and eventually selective memories, whereas documents are less accommodating. A properly preserved photograph, forensic examination or witness statement remains stubbornly specific.

What happens to the victim?

There is nevertheless a danger in talking about war crimes exclusively in terms of international tribunals. The victim of torture needs rather more than the promise that perhaps one day somebody will stand in a courtroom in The Hague, because the immediate consequences of torture, injury or captivity cannot wait upon the leisurely timetable of international justice.

This was the most striking aspect of a conversation the Lviv Herald had with Serhii, a KHPG lawyer who has worked with the organisation since 2023. He did not describe his work in grand geopolitical terms. Instead he described what happens after a damaged human being enters the legal system, and his account was dominated by the practical mechanics of turning injury into evidence and evidence into legal protection.

KHPG lawyers collect evidence and seek the opening or progression of criminal investigations. They work with investigators and prosecutors. Where victims have suffered physical injuries, lawyers can help arrange forensic medical examinations, while psychological injuries may require expert assessment. People may need assistance obtaining disability status, medical treatment or state compensation. Former civilian detainees may need help establishing their legal status and obtaining the benefits to which Ukrainian law entitles them.

KHPG has deliberately developed this broader model of assistance, combining legal work with access to psychologists, doctors, humanitarian assistance and financial support. The underlying principle is straightforward: a person who has been tortured does not cease to be a human being once his testimony has been entered into a prosecutor’s file. Indeed the legal case may be only a small part of what is required to restore some semblance of ordinary life.

Serhii described work involving people from the Kupiansk, Izium and Balakliia areas, places whose names have become associated with the Russian occupation of parts of Kharkiv Region in 2022. People were detained there, he explained, sometimes in inhuman conditions, and subjected to torture. The lawyer’s job now is to turn what happened to them into evidence and to help the survivors negotiate the bewildering collection of medical, administrative and criminal procedures that follows. This is human rights work stripped of abstraction, reduced to the decidedly unromantic business of helping individual people navigate the consequences of catastrophe.

The geography of captivity

Some of KHPG’s most disturbing work concerns prisoners of war, civilian detainees and missing people. Finding them can itself become an exercise in investigation, involving testimony, documentary material, open-source information and audiovisual evidence to trace prisoners and places of detention.

There is a particularly cruel quality to disappearance, because death, however terrible, eventually permits mourning. Disappearance denies even that certainty. A family does not know whether to grieve or hope, whether somebody is in a prison, a hospital, an unmarked grave or simply somewhere from which communication has become impossible. Human rights work in these circumstances becomes almost archaeological, as fragments of information have to be assembled until a person reappears from the informational darkness.

The problem is multiplied by the geography of the war. A prisoner may have been seized in one Ukrainian town, moved through another detention facility and subsequently transferred to occupied territory or Russia itself. Records may be fragmentary or inaccessible.

Witnesses may know only the first name of another detainee, or remember the appearance of a building without knowing where it was. A lawyer or investigator is left to reconstruct a human journey from fragments.

Torture and the occupied territories

KHPG and its partners have devoted particular attention to allegations of torture in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. Their documentation has addressed detention facilities in areas of Kharkiv Region including Izium, Kupiansk, Balakliia and Vovchansk, and the evidence collected describes overcrowding, degrading conditions, physical abuse and the alleged use of torture to extract information or compel cooperation.

These allegations must ultimately be assessed according to the evidential standards of the relevant courts and tribunals, and that qualification is important. Human rights organisations document and submit evidence; courts determine individual criminal responsibility. Yet courts cannot determine anything unless somebody has preserved the evidence first, and that is the indispensable intermediate role occupied by organisations such as KHPG.

There is another reason this work matters. Torture is peculiarly vulnerable to denial because it generally takes place behind closed doors, frequently without independent witnesses and often in circumstances in which the authorities responsible control the records. The victim’s body, memory and testimony may therefore constitute essential evidence, supplemented wherever possible by medical examinations, photographs, contemporaneous records and corroborating accounts from other detainees.

Memory as resistance

There is another side to KHPG’s activities that may ultimately prove almost as important. The organisation maintains an extensive publishing operation, while its Voices of War project records the experiences of people who have lived through invasion, occupation, bombardment and captivity. These accounts belong to a different category from criminal evidence, although inevitably the two sometimes overlap.

Courts necessarily reduce events to legal categories: unlawful confinement, torture, murder, destruction of civilian property. History requires something more. It needs people to remember what the kitchen looked like before the missile came through the building. It needs somebody to remember what prisoners talked about in a crowded cell. It needs the story of the elderly person who would not leave a village, the mother who crossed the country with her children and the civilian who returned from captivity unable to sleep. The history of a war cannot consist solely of maps showing arrows advancing across territory, because wars happen to human beings.

Perhaps this is where KHPG’s origins in the Soviet dissident movement become most significant. The Soviet Union devoted extraordinary resources not merely to imprisoning people but to manipulating memory. People disappeared from photographs, crimes disappeared from official histories and victims disappeared into euphemisms. Memorial emerged from the conviction that recording names, places and experiences was itself a form of resistance to authoritarian power. More than three decades later, that principle has acquired renewed importance in Ukraine.

Human rights during war

There is also an uncomfortable paradox at the centre of KHPG’s existence, because a genuine human rights organisation cannot merely investigate the enemy. KHPG continues to report on domestic Ukrainian human rights questions, including prisoners’ rights, freedom of expression, displaced people, rule of law issues and the conduct of Ukrainian institutions. Its mission has always contained an important duality: to protect individuals against violations by the state while simultaneously helping the state develop institutions capable of protecting rights and freedoms.

That task becomes more difficult during an existential war. Democracies at war inevitably grant governments extraordinary powers. Military secrecy becomes necessary, while freedoms that appear straightforward in peacetime encounter questions of mobilisation, intelligence, collaboration and national security. Public tolerance of criticism diminishes when soldiers are dying, and accusations of disloyalty can easily become substitutes for arguments about where legitimate restrictions upon liberty should end.

Yet the argument for preserving human rights institutions becomes stronger rather than weaker in such circumstances. Ukraine’s claim to belong to the European democratic tradition is not merely a claim about which flag flies above a government building. It is a claim about what kind of state Ukraine intends to be. A country cannot convincingly defend the rule of law abroad while regarding it as an inconvenience at home, nor can it sensibly suspend its importance until some indefinite moment at which the war is finally declared over.

This is one reason organisations such as KHPG sometimes occupy an uncomfortable position. Their task is neither to be cheerleaders for the Ukrainian government nor to adopt the contrarian habit of assuming moral equivalence between aggressor and defender. Their task is more difficult: to insist that principles remain principles precisely when circumstances make them inconvenient.

The patient construction of justice

It is easy to become cynical about international justice. Courts move slowly, investigations take years, suspects may remain beyond the reach of arrest warrants, governments change and international attention wanders towards the next crisis. A victim who has survived torture might reasonably wonder what consolation lies in being told that an impeccably drafted legal submission has been dispatched to an international institution that may deliberate upon it for the next decade.

None of that makes documentation futile, because the alternative is considerably worse. Without evidence there can be no prosecution. Without names there can be no individual responsibility. Without preserved testimony there is only competing propaganda, and without records today’s crime becomes tomorrow’s historical argument. Justice delayed may be profoundly unsatisfactory, but justice rendered impossible through the disappearance of evidence is worse.

The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group therefore works in an unusual temporal dimension. Its lawyers help people who need assistance today while simultaneously collecting evidence for proceedings that may not take place for years. Its psychologists deal with memories of yesterday, while its databases are being assembled for the courts and historians of tomorrow. Few professions require quite so much simultaneous attention to past, present and future.

Serhii’s account of his work was strikingly matter-of-fact. There were investigations to initiate, medical examinations to arrange, documents to collect, compensation procedures to pursue and cases already making their way through Ukrainian courts. There was little rhetoric in it, and perhaps that is precisely the point. The closer one comes to the practical work of human rights, the less grandiose the vocabulary becomes.

Human rights are most valuable when they cease to be rhetoric. They become a lawyer sitting opposite somebody who has been tortured and asking the right questions. They become a psychologist helping that person live with what happened, a doctor recording injuries, a photograph with a verified location, a witness statement taken carefully and eventually a file placed before a judge.

Kharkiv is a city in which missiles still fall, and it is also a city in which people continue patiently assembling the documentary architecture of justice. Somewhere amidst the violence, somebody is taking a witness statement, arranging an examination, recording a name or filing another document. Civilisation sometimes consists of nothing more glamorous than that, but history may eventually depend upon it.