The nation’s highest court for criminal and civil cases on Jan. 23 upheld two lower court rulings that found father and son Dmytro Pavlychenko and Serhiy Pavlychenko guilty of murdering a judge.
Their lawyer, Tetyana Shevchenko, said they now will take
their case to the European Court of Human Rights for fair trial violations. A
case is already open concerning the Pavlychenkos on “torture” and “inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment.”
A panel of three judges at the High
Specialized Court of Ukraine for Civil and Criminal Cases ruled that Dmytro
Pavlychenko, 50, and his son, Serhiy Pavlychenko, 21, had on March 21, 2011
killed 42-year-old Kyiv Shevchenko District Court Judge Serhiy
Zubkov.
The father is currently serving a life sentence
in a Chernihiv Oblast prison, while his son is incarcerated in Kharkiv Oblast
with a 13-year prison term.
“I’m totally shocked that even the High Special Court would
not examine all the omitted and (throw out all the) fabricated evidence in the
case that would’ve found us not guilty,” Dmytro Pavlychenko told the Kyiv Post
by phone from prison. “This was a totally fabricated case, it’s all a fable.”
Police have defended the case as well-documented and
well-investigated and say the right people were convicted. Authorities say the
Pavlychenkos’ murder motive was revenge.
Zubkov, the judge, had evicted the Pavlychenko family from
their centrally located Kyiv apartment in a December 2010 ruling in favor of
Gooioord BV, a Dutch-registered real estate developer. According to the Dec. 2,
2012 verdict, Dmytro Pavlychenko recruited his then-18-year-old son to murder
the judge at the entrance to his apartment. Zubkov was found dead with three knife
wounds to the neck and two gunshot wounds to the chest.
From the outset Dmytro Pavlychenko and Serhiy Pavlychenko,
who is a member of a hard-core Dynamo Kyiv soccer team fan club, have
maintained their innocence.
On the day of Zubkov’s murder, Dmytro Pavlychenko said he
was celebrating his wedding anniversary with his wife. He said during the
celebration, he had a telephone conversation with his lawyer during the time
police say the judge was killed.
All three courts who ruled on the case have refused to
accept Dmytro Pavlychenko’s phone records as evidence for the defense.
In January 2013, confidential case file materials in the
controversial murder were made available to media outlets, including the Kyiv
Post, that suggest the Pavlychenkos are innocent. In consultation with two
lawyers, including Shevchenko, the Kyiv Post examined the materials, which
point to a body of evidence that the official version omitted because it
appears to exonerate the accused perpetrators and would’ve damaged the prosecutors’
case.
The alleged whistleblower who sent the Kyiv Post an e-mailed
message on Jan. 31, 2013 that included the Internet address of the file sharing
website said the information was made public “on behalf of all prosecutors who
still have a conscience left,” adding that he cannot “look at such a disgrace
with what is being done in the name of the public prosecutor’s office in the
courts anymore.”
The anonymous e-mailer furthermore wrote that “when the
(murder) case is thrown together so insolently and thoughtlessly, then it’s
clear to even the inexperienced (law enforcer) that (the case) received
approval from very high up.”
In response, the Kyiv City Prosecutor’s Office on Feb. 6,
2013 called the case file disclosure “nothing but pressure on the courts” since
the murder case was still being heard by an appeals court.
Defenders of the Pavlychenkos, including human rights groups
and members of the Dynamo Kyiv fan club, say the police failed to examine other
motives in Zubkov’s murder. As a judge he presided over many property
development disputes between powerful companies and residents. A cursory study
of the court cases over which he presided revealed that he made several rulings
leading up to his death in favor of the public interest. One was over a property
on Honchara Street, just blocks away from the historic Saint Sophia Cathedral
on which the
Kyiv Post had reported.
In his ruling, he prevented a company from developing a
property on 17/23 Honchara Street and denied the developer Hr 560,000 in
damages it sought from preservationists for removing an enclosure around the
development. Zubkov also put a halt to a property development near Kyiv’s
Oleksandrivska Hospital in downtown Kyiv. On Sept. 15, 2010, the judge left
kindergarten No. 183 in public ownership, ruling against another property
developer.
Supporters moreover point to a Nov. 7, 2012 High Special
Court ruling that reversed Zubkov’s ruling to evict the Pavlychenko family.
Additionally, on March 24, 2011, three days after Zubkov’s murder the High Council
of Justice, the government body that fires and hires judges, was scheduled to
start a hearing into whether Zubkov had violated judicial ethics.
Human rights court is
last hope
The European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg has already
opened a case filed by Kyrylo Paseniuk of the European Human Rights Group on
behalf of the Pavlychenkos under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human
Rights that prohibits torture.
Paseniuk said that the group will file another case under
Article 6 with regard to the right to a fair trial.
Human rights cases usually take between one and three years
before a ruling is reached, according to the activist.
Ukraine’s law enforcement system convicts more than 90
percent of people charged with crimes, and almost all of them without any jury
trials. According to the European Court of Human Rights judge from Ukraine Anna
Yudkivska, Ukraine had the second highest number of claims – some 10,000 –
submitted to the court in 2012.
Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected].
