You're reading: Yanukovych’s security admits limiting freedom of speech

 A senior official from the president's guard admitted on Sept. 17 that his staff limited people's freedom of speech in at least one occasion on Sept. 3.

On that day, Kyiv hosted a congress of the World Association of Newspaper Publishers and the World Editors’ Forum. A number of Ukrainian journalists silently protested against curbs of freedom of speech and growing pressure on journalists since the election of President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010.

 They brought in a number of self-made posters. Some of them had Stop Censorship slogans, others listed recent facts of pressure on TVi, an oppositional TV channel,  and demanded to make public the secret trial of the murderer of journalist Georgiy Gongadze 12 years ago, among other things. The posters contained Ukrainian text on one side, and English on the other.

Some of them were confiscated by a worker of the presidential guard service, and the process of confiscation was videotaped by journalists.

 Oleh Herasyk, director of the department for support of activity of the presidential guard, admitted on Sept. 17 that a female worker of his department took an arbitrary decision to confiscate one of the posters, effectively limiting freedom of speech and expression, which is guaranteed by the Constitution.

 “At the metal detector, one poster was confiscated which contained text in English, which the worker could not understand,” Herasyk told a meeting of a joint working group of journalists and state officials which meets once a month to discuss problems in the media sector. Herasyk also admitted that there is no official regulation that allows her to do that.

Herasyk’s official role was to protect the security of the president, who was giving an opening speech at the forum on the same day, and who was one of the addressees of the journalists’ protest.

 The working group, which was initiated by  Yanukovych almost a year ago, also discussed the issue of roughing up several journalists by an unidentified security guard with an official badge at the forum.

 No criminal case has been started yet, despite the fact that chief editor of Ukrainska Pravda filed an application to the police on Sept. 5, and another one was filed a week later by Stop Censorship movement, which organized the protest.

At the meeting, Deputy Prosecutor General Viktor Bilous said that Kyiv’s prosecutor office asked the Pechersk district police to renew investigation of the incident.

 “On Sept. 14, the Pechersk district police department refused to start the criminal case. But we think that the investigators have not checked all circumstances of the incident,” Bilous said. “Therefore, with the  prosecutor’s involvement, today the case has been restarted. The results of additional check the Interior Ministry must publish by Sept. 28.”

 The president, who was not present at the meeting, also issued an order on the same day for National TV and Radio Council, the regulator, to investigate the problems around TVi channel.

 For months, the channel has been thrown out of cable networks in at least 11 cities, tax authorities have made claims of tax evasion, and a criminal case was started and then closed against its director Mykola Kniazhytskiy, who is now running on the opposition’s party ticket.

Yanukovych in his address said he was “worried about the information on obstruction of broadcasting and commercial activity of the channel.”

Kyiv Post editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected]