Several hearings in the trial of Oleksii Pukach, the main perpetrator of the crimes tried in the notorious Gongadze-Podolsky case, were held on October 26-30. One must pay attention to them, for the facts they have uncovered are egregious. During the October 26 hearing, legal team of victim Oleksii Podolsky filed a motion requesting the court to attach to the case file indisputable evidence showing that the panel of judges of the Kyiv Court of Appeal, including Stepan Hladii, Mykola Yashchenko, and Mykola Khudyk, prepared to make a deliberately unjust decision. It turned out that the Unified State Register of Judgments (USRJ), part of the official website of the judiciary of Ukraine, listed no procedural documents as approved by this Hladii-led panel in the case against Pukach.
“In line with provisions of the law, all court decisions must be added to the USRJ no later than the day after their announcement in court,” the victim’s trial representative Oleksandr Yeliashkevych commented for The Day. “This requirement is necessary to ensure that the public has direct access to information related to the administration of justice and control of the judiciary. However, to date, neither the media nor the parties to the proceedings have had effective access to this important information in the case, while the decisions taken earlier, including illegal ones, are subject to manipulations and fraud, which we have repeatedly detected. The Hladii-led panel of judges is doing it deliberately, probably relying on guarantees of impunity promised at the top, by high officials who directly influence the judges and the trial itself.”
“The panel pretends, for some reason, that nothing has happened and keeps failing to add its decisions to the register,” Yeliashkevych continued. “When asked about it, they do not offer any answer. Protesting against yet another abuse committed by Hladii and his colleagues, Podolsky demands the immediate addition of all decisions to the registry, including those illegal decisions by which the judges removed him from the trial. This brazen and cynical violation of the law should have met legal sanction long ago, but permission to commit abuses trumps any legal, moral, and ethical standards. Prosecutors and Myroslava Gongadze’s trial representative Valentyna Telychenko also pretend that nothing has happened. I have long stopped to marvel at it, because they, together with the panel of judges, provide the conditions under which the appeal process has long ago turned into a legal farce and a series of insults to victim Podolsky.”
At the most recent hearing, held on October 30, there was another important and revealing event. An experienced, highly professional lawyer joined victim Podolsky’s legal team. Viktor Shyshkin is one of the nation’s best constitutional lawyers, a co-author of the Basic Law of Ukraine, Judge of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine in 2006-15. However, it was not easy to have him enter the proceedings. Representatives of the Prosecutor General’s Office, knowing Shyshkin and his significance for the trial, still opposed it strongly, arguing that the victim had enough representatives already. Telychenko did not oppose it, but protested against adjourning the trial to give the new representative time to review the case file. The judges also did not want to allow Shyshkin to join the trial, but had to agree to it.
“As a representative, I want to present my arguments regarding the evidence which the trial court had not taken into account, I mean the Melnychenko tapes, which are evidence too,” Shyshkin commented for The Day. “Now that I am Podolsky’s trial representative, I can do it officially. This should be recorded in the minutes, and then the court will decide, based on their understanding of conscience and the rule of law, whether to heed my arguments or not. In my opinion, the Melnychenko tapes are an important piece of evidence in this case, related to the next episodes, like the Gongadze murder, the assault on Podolsky, and the attack on MP Yeliashkevych. Furthermore, I want to observe the progress of this trial from the inside, that is, to look into the order of the appeal deliberations, given that the victim and his representative Yeliashkevych raise the question of further investigation, namely of the points that were missed by the trial court, presided by judge of Pechersk District Court Andrii Melnyk.”
As you know, I once was deputy chairman of the parliamentary commission that investigated the crimes. Accordingly, I can also give an explanation for evidence gathered by the special investigation commission and ignored by the official investigation. It was transferred to the Prosecutor General’s Office to be attached to the case file in the early 2000s. So, when I will review the evidence now, I will be able to see whether they were really attached to the case file.”
