People’s Deputy Oleksandr Lavrynovych during his report in parliament on the work of the temporary parliamentary commission on the disappearance of journalist Heorhy Gongadze stressed the need to review the authorities of Verkhovna Rada temporary investigation commissions. In this way lawmakers again returned to the issue that our society lacks the ability to control the actions of law enforcement structures. The Gongadze case uncovered a contradiction between the existing constitutional norms (Part 4, Article 89 of the Constitution on the creation by parliament of “temporary investigation commissions on issues of public interest”) and the absence of the real mechanisms for their investigations.
As a result, if at the dawn of our independence a parliamentary commission could demand the information from an investigation and would get it, then the commission of Lavrynovych, in the words of its chairman, upon having sent fifteen inquiries to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, National Security Council, and the Prosecutor’s Office, has received answers to far from all its questions (simultaneously, on its part, it has familiarized itself with the investigation in detail in the minutes of its meetings). “Evaluating the volume and content of the information that was supplied to the commission by law enforcement bodies and that was announced by them in media, we still have to determine the inconsistency of actions by the guardians of the law” is a particularly prominent theme in the commission’s report. On the one hand, there is the appropriate reference to the prohibition of disclosing the data of a preliminary investigation, and on the other the announcement of certain details on the course of this investigation in the media. Thus, for example, to the inquiry of the commission on the identification of people who were watching Gongadze and those who collected information about him from neighbors and relatives, we have not received any information. Yet simultaneously individual facts are disclosed, such as his being treated for wounds in a Tbilisi hospital, car accident in Turkey, purchasing a ticket under the name of Gongadze in Moscow, and a message on the appearance of the lost journalist in one of the bars or train car, which, undoubtedly, is shaping public opinion in a certain way.”
The conclusion of the Lavrynovych Commission is unambiguous: “There is an urgent need for legal regulation of the creation and activity of temporary investigation commissions of Verkhovna Rada.” This the law should clearly specify the authority and tools of work of such commissions separately in cases when there is an ongoing investigation by law enforcement bodies and in cases when such a commission takes it up independently.
For the investigators of the parliamentary commission to be an efficient tool for conducting investigations or oversight over the holding of investigations, urgent legislative actions are required, said Oleksandr Lavrynovych. Today in Ukraine a quite unhelpful legal situation has been created, in particular in terms of the supervision of criminal investigations. Today the Prosecutor’s Office has the sole right to initiate a criminal case, to make a preliminary investigation, to exercise oversight over a preliminary investigation, to represent the interests of the state in the court in the case, and after consideration of the case in court the right to appeal the sentence of the court. This chain is sufficient proof of the fact that these functions should be decentralized. If we want constitutional norms to be observed and for the work of deputies’ commissions to be effective, we have to introduce the necessary changes into the draft Criminal and Process Code that is now being considered, as well as other documents that are relevant to investigative actions and the right of oversight over them.
