Holodomor - Legal Recognition

Legal Recognition

As of March 2008, several governments have recognized the actions of the Soviet government as an act of genocide. The joint statement at the United Nations in 2003 has defined the famine as the result of actions and policies of the totalitarian regime that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Kazakhs and other nationalities in the USSR. On 28 November 2006, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) narrowly passed a law defining the Holodomor as a deliberate act of genocide and made public denial illegal. Even though in April 2010 newly elected president Yanukovych reversed Yushchenko's position on the Holodomor famine, the law has not been repealed and remains in force. On 23 October 2008, the European Parliament adopted a resolution that recognized the Holodomor as a crime against humanity.

On 12 January 2010, the court of appeals in Kiev opened hearings into the "fact of genocide-famine Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–33". In May 2009 the Security Service of Ukraine started a criminal case "in relation to the genocide in Ukraine in 1932–33". In a ruling on 13 January 2010 the court found Joseph Stalin and other Bolshevik leaders guilty of genocide against the Ukrainians. The court dropped criminal proceedings against the leaders: Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Stanislav Kosior, Pavel Postyshev and others, who all had died years before. This decision became effective on 21 January 2010.

On 27 April 2010, a draft Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe resolution declared the famine was caused by the "cruel and deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime" and was responsible for the deaths of "millions of innocent people" in Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Russia. Even though PACE found Stalin guilty of causing the famine, they rejected several amendments to the resolution, which proposed the Holodomor be recognized as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.