Today, on 3 June, an unofficial ad hoc meeting within the frameworks of the Incident Prevention and Response Mechanism was took place in the Georgian village of Ergneti.
"Representatives of South Ossetia, Georgia, OSCE and EUMM took part in the meeting. The agenda included only two questions: the findings of the interim report of Council of Europe independent experts investigating the abduction of South Ossetian citizens by Georgian law enforcers and discussions of these findings in question-answer manner", reported Deputy Plenipotentiary for Post-Conflict Settlement Merab Chigoev. According to him, as a result of Geneva discussions on security in South Caucasus and meetings between the South Ossetian Plenipotentiary for Human Rights David Sanakoev and CoE Commissioner for Human Rights Tomas Hammarberg, an agreement was reached that independent international experts would be assigned to look into the cases of missing South Ossetians. "We speak about citizens, who, according to verified information, were kept by Georgian law enforcement bodies in 2008", said Chigoev.
He also underlined that the international experts had conducted necessary work and prepared an interim report to be voiced by Tomas Hammarberg. The HR Commissioner could not attend the meeting but had phoned from Stockholm and responded to all raised issues in relation to the report. "One should admit that neither the statement made by Hammarberg nor the report presented by the experts had contained any proved details about the fate of our citizens", reported Chigoev. He reminded that South Ossetia had suspended its participation in the IPRM based on the absence of true information on the fate of abducted South Ossetians. "We hoped that today the grounds for suspended participation of the South Ossetian side would be exhausted, but Hammarberg's statement and the experts' report did not help. In the meantime, Hammarberg stated that the experts continued their efforts and there were grounds for assumed possibility to gain new details about our citizens by the end of June. This is also the time when the experts' report will be finalized", underlined Chigoev. He expressed the hope that the work of the experts would be objective. "However, I place little hope on any substantial results, since it is what Georgia does not want. Without the Georgian authorities' good will, any efforts of international experts will bring no results", concluded Chigoev.
It is worth reminding that the three young persons were abducted in Tskhinval district of South Ossetia on 13 October 2008. Four more South Ossetian citizens were seized by Georgian armed forces on 8 August 2008.
