Last Friday Verkhovna Rada put the item On the Progress of Investigation into the Disappearance of Journalist Gongadze on the agenda of the next plenary week’s special parliamentary session. The draft resolution mooted by five people’s deputies suggests that President Leonid Kuchma; Minister of Internal Affairs Yuri Kravchenko; Prosecutor- General, Mykhailo Potebenko; and the Security Service chief, Leonid Derkach, be invited to this session, Interfax-Ukraine reports.
At the same time, parliament turned down the proposal of Socialist Deputy Stanislav Nikolayenko to hear in camera the report of the parliamentary investigative commission on the disappearance of Gongadze.
The agency reports President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine views Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz’s claim that the President is implicated in the disappearance of journalist Heorhy Gongadze as provocation. Addressing journalists in Minsk last Friday after meeting President Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia, he stressed, “This is a provocation perhaps devised by foreign secret services.” He also added: “It is still to be established which services were involved.” To which Mr. Shevardnadze said in turn: “Or to be guessed.”
Meanwhile, the Pechersk district court of Kyiv has opened a criminal case against Socialist Party leader Moroz as per Article 125, Part 3, Criminal Code of Ukraine, on the basis of a libel suit from Volodymyr Lytvyn, head of the Presidential Administration. The district court has forwarded the case to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine “for proper investigation.” Minister of Internal Affairs Yuri Kravchenko has requested Prosecutor General’s Office to make a decision in connection with Mr. Moroz’s claim.
In his turn, the Socialist Party leader said he “was never involved in information collection or bugging; moreover, the SBU has confirmed its experts’ opinion that this is in fact impossible. Thus the record does exist, and it was clearly made by some operatives. In other words, it is the object of investigation and prosecution,” Mr. Moroz stated.
Interfax-Ukraine has also released the commentary of an anonymous judge who often dealt, the agency claims, with cases in which one of the contesting sides produced an audio-recording as evidence. This judge said an audio-recording can be interpreted by a Ukrainian court as evidence if a relevant expert examination proves its authenticity and identifies the recorded voices.
“The Supreme Court of Ukraine has officially explained that a court can accept an audio recording as evidence if the party that claims it should be recognized as such (i.e., as evidence — Ed.) also produces the complete printout of what is recorded on the audiocassette,” the interviewee told the agency. Answering the question whether or not it contravenes the law if the judge who hears a criminal case uses evidence obtained in a legally unauthorized way, for example, without the oblast judge’s sanction to bug premises, the expert pointed out that the defendant in a criminal trial will have to take care of his own defense. “To defend himself, he is allowed to use any kind of evidence at his disposal which he thinks authentic,” the judge said. He also noted that if an audio recording is part of the evidence, investigation should only be carried out by a public prosecutor.
The public prosecutor’s office will object to an audio-recording being used as evidence in court if it was done in a legally-unauthorized way without an oblast judge’s sanction. This explanation was given to Interfax-Ukraine by an undisclosed public prosecutor who usually represents the state in trials, when he commented on the possible options in the hearing of any case opened against Article 125, Part 3 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (libel constituting an accusation of committing a grave crime), which features an audio recording done without a proper sanction. “If the recording was done by interested persons, this is subject to examination in the course of a prosecutor’s investigation. It must be established under what conditions and circumstances it was done, and those who have something to do with this should be questioned,” the prosecutor said. He also noted there will be an expert examination. “Only after this can it become part of evidence,” the interviewee stressed. The prosecutor also disclosed that unsanctioned bugging is considered as violation of the Constitution and intrusion on privacy. However, he pointed out, this entails no criminal liability.
P. S. The headline has nothing to do with a well-known audiocassette company.
