Courtroom news have been earning primetime of late. Yesterday, the Pechersk District Court of Kyiv got around to the ex-Major Melnychenko case, on charges pressed by the lawyers of Leonid Kuchma, ex-President of Ukraine. Compared to other such cases, this one shows a clear distinction, in that the court hearing are over not by Justice Vovk, but by his younger counterpart, Rodion Kirieiev. What little is known about him is that he was transferred from a court of law in Kyiv oblast to the Pechersk District Court by a pre-sidential edict. “This judge has never handled sophisticated cases and made rulings only in terms of preventive mea-sures,” Yulia Tymoshenko told journalists last night. Be that as it may, Justice Kirieiev is now handling Tymoshenko’s gas case.
Another interesting aspect is that Valentyna Telychenko, the defense counsel in the Gongadze case for the assassinated journalist’s mother, appears to have sided with Kuchma’s lawyers. She believes that the criminal proceedings in the Melnychenko case will help solve the mysterious Gongadze case: “We will never, under any circumstances, be able to use the [Melnychenko] tapes in court unless we have sufficient forensic proof of their authenticity and of the manner in which these tapes were made.”
Sviatoslav Piskun, three time Pro-secutor General of Ukraine, told The Day: “If there is no Melnychenko case, there will be no way to prove that these tapes are ge-nuine.”
Melnychenko’s view is the exact opposite. Yesterday his press service issued a statement to the effect that he is in possession of reliable information, that the Kuchma family has paid 25,000,000 dollars for the resumption of criminal proceedings. Melnychenko feels sure that the ex-President of Ukraine is making every effort to pass the buck, blaming the person who made the tapes that can serve as evidence of Kuchma’s crimes, so as to discredit that person as a source of information and as a witness in the courtroom.
“The court handed down this ruling,” he noted, “although Leonid Kuchma’s lawyers, who have filed a claim about the allegedly unlawful dismissal of my criminal case, are not a party to this case. Nor are they the aggrieved party. In theory, this case could be appealed by me or the state, as an aggrieved party, for example, by the Prosecutor-General’s Office. But neither the Prosecutor-General’s Office nor I have done so.”
“But the Pechersk Court resolved to start the proceedings, taking hold of 55 volumes of this case in a matter of days. But even if Kuchma’s lawyers had ample legal grounds to reopen a case against me, the time period stipulated by the law expired long ago. The prosecutors’ decision could have been appealed within seven days, but several years have passed since then,” Melnychenko insists.
Attitudes to Melnychenko may differ, but in this case his reasoning sounds quite logical. This court action fits in very well with the campaign to whitewash Kuchma.
It will be recalled that Kuchma is being accused of power abuse, which carries a maximum 10-year prison term. But those in the know believe that, with due account of the authorities’ friendly attitude to the ex-president, the court will finally acquit the defendant — either under a statute of limitations that ended in 2010 or for failure to prove the guilt.
By all accounts, all the charges are based on Major Melnychenko’s tapes. So it is very important for Kuchma’s lawyers now to have these tapes withdrawn from the case and to discredit the witness.
The impression is that, exercising full control over Ukrainian courts and the Prosecutor-General’s Office, the authorities do not care too much about the quality and logic of court rulings. But how can a country further develop if it has no fair justice and any opponent of the government can be thrown behind bars?
