U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft has said that the court made numerous abuses in the case of former interior minister Yuriy Lutsenko, violating his right to the presumption of innocence, the Dzerkalo Tyzhnia Weekly wrote.
“Most recently, the court (the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR) ruled illegal the pre-trial arrest and detention of Lutsenko, a former interior minister. In its verdict the court not only recognized the treatment of Lutsenko as illegal, but also sharply criticized the prosecution, the trial and the appellate court for abuse of pre-trial procedures,” Tefft wrote in his article for ZN.UA.
According to him, the ECHR considers particularly disturbing the fact that one of the main reasons for putting Lutsenko in custody named by the prosecution and the court was an attempt to prevent his public statements about his innocence and criticism of the investigation. Such a reasoning for pre-trial detention means that the person is immediately considered guilty, which is contrary to the constitutionally guaranteed right to the presumption of innocence,” the diplomat said.
“This is exactly the type of improper legal arguments that can be expected from the judicial system, which is built to support the prosecution and proceeds from the principle that the police and prosecutors are never wrong and they are not required to prove the lawfulness of their actions, one cannot imagine such legal reasoning in a competitive system of criminal justice,” Tefft said.
Pechersky District Court in Kyiv on February 27 2012 found Lutsenko guilty of abuse of office and sentenced him to four years in jail. A court of appeals in Kyiv on May 16 upheld this verdict.
On August 17, Pechersky District Court sentenced Lutsenko to another two years in prison after convicting him of negligence when he ordered to prolong the surveillance over Valentyn Davydenko, a driver of the Ukrainian Security Council’s ex-deputy head Volodymyr Satsiuk.
Lutsenko was arrested on December 26, 2010. He has been held at Kyiv’s pre-trial detention center since then.
Lutsenko’s defense lawyers had earlier appealed the ex-minister’s arrest with the ECHR, and the ECHR said the arrest on July 3 violated Lutsenko’s rights and obliged Ukraine to pay 15,000 euros in damages to Lutsenko.
