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Human Rights in Ukraine Information website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group |
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Volodymyr Batchaev from the Ukrainian Association of Human Rights Monitors of Law Enforcement considers that the new Criminal Procedure Code seriously restricts a person’s choice of defender in court proceedings 
As of 10 December 2012, 1,545 people had been in SIZO or remand units without any conviction for over 18 months. 
The timing was unreal. On the same day that five judges of the High Administrative Court stripped an opposition MP of his parliamentary mandate and immunity from prosecution, the government reported plans to improve security for judges and their families. 
Yury Yakymenko, Director of Political – Legal Programmes for the Razumkov Centre sees a clear political motive in both the new murder charges against Yulia Tymoshenko and the supposed new evidence against Kuchma over the killing of Georgy Gongadze 
While politically motivated trials of opposition leaders have sent Ukraine’s reputation and chances of European integration plummeting, the judges involved are at present on an upward spiral 
Ukraine does not have a mechanism for reviewing the cases of life prisoners. Their only chance of proving a miscarriage of justice remains the European Court of Human Rights. 
These are much publicized crimes which high-ranking officials – the President, Head of the SBU [Security Service] or Interior Minister – take under their personal control issuing urgent instructions to find the criminals 
The trial of four men charged in connection with a series of bomb explosions in Dnipropetrovsk last year has been deferred until 12 March. While the judges say this is over protests, the sister (and lawyer) of one of the defendants believes it is to dull public interest in yet another profoundly worrying case 
The First Deputy Prosecutor General has stated that the Prosecutor’s Office has sufficient evidence to prove that former President Leonid Kucham was involved in the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze 
Why the case of three young men charged over a bomb blast in a Zaporizhya Church on 28 July 2010 warrants close scrutiny from all bodies fighting torture and concerned over problems with the justice system in Ukraine. I 
The latest court hearing in the case of the young men charged over the Zaporizhya Church bomb in July 2010 will take place on 7 February. As the text mentions, it will be without one of the defendants lawyers whom the presiding judge has removed from the case. This is only one of a very large number of grounds for concern 
A Ukrainian court has yet again sentenced a man to life imprisonment without any proof that he committed the crime. 
Three young men, two former sacristans of the Church and the elder brother of one of them have effectively become hostages of a promise made to the President to solve a crime within the week 
Three young men charged in connection with the 2010 explosion have been in detention without sentence for two and a half years. Their case is known in Ukraine as the “case of the sacristans” and urgently needs to be raised at the EU-Ukraine Summit precisely because its outcome is widely seen as being quite unrelated to the guilt or otherwise of the defendants. 
The case of three young men tried over the bomb which exploded in the Svyato-Prokovsk Church, Zaporizhya on 28 July 2010 continues to cause grave concern. The following gives some idea why 
On Tuesday, former Police General Oleksy Pukach was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze. His final words to the court were that he would agree if Kuchma and Lytvyn were on trial with him. He had told everything, he said, but nobody in the court wanted to know 
Supporters of Dmytro Pavlichenko and his son Serhiy, convicted last year of the murder of a Kyiv judge, have set up a petition on the US White House site against their conviction and calling for the Magnitsky bill to be extended to Ukraine. 
Donetsk Memorial’s efforts to find out about compensation for the huge amounts the State pays in implementation of European Court of Human Rights judgements 
The EU Ambassador to Ukraine, Jan Tombiński has reiterated that there can be no progress in EU-Ukraine relations until the issue of selective justice is resolved 
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