But such was the unpleasant situation the newspaper found itself last week involving Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin’s Oct. 3 open letter to the U.S. Congress, written in Russian.
Rather than alert us to their preferred English-language translation (published on page 5 and posted on the General Prosecutor’s Office website on Oct. 5), Kuzmin opted to call in chief editor Brian Bonner to his office on Oct. 6. There, Kuzmin said that he thought the newspaper intentionally tried to damage his reputation by publishing the faulty translation online.
We assured him that we had no such intention. Nor do we think a bad translation can damage anybody’s reputation. He said he was contemplating legal action, but quickly softened his demands to an apology and correction. We did so because we should have edited the translation more closely, labeled it as an unofficial translation and asked the prosecutor for a better version. Others think we did nothing wrong at all – that it was important to quickly report the news that a powerful public figure was writing an open letter to the American Congress.
This is the same Congress whose Senate, after all, on Sept. 22 unanimously held out the prospect of sanctions against Ukrainian officials responsible for the imprisonment of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and others in cases that the West considers to be political persecutions. If any sanctions were applied against Ukrainian officials by the West for these cases, Kuzmin would be high on the list.
The larger issue, however, is that no one stands a chance in Ukraine’s barbaric criminal justice system that Kuzmin represents. It appears that the General Prosecutor’s Office decides everything – guilt, innocence, who goes to jail and for how long, who doesn’t, what cases are opened and closed, which innocent enemies get hounded and which guilty friends go free.
Such a Kafkaesque nightmare that Ukrainians face is a byproduct of a judicial system that is highly politicized – from the appointment of judges to top prosecutors. Jury trials, a final line of defense against excessive state authority, are non-existent. Due process and the presumption of innocence are absent in a secretive pre-trial system that allows suspects to be jailed indefinitely and that permits years to go by before any trial takes place.
Everyone who runs roughshod in this environment insists that the judiciary and prosecutors act independently and in the public’s interest. Nonsense. This system has nothing in common with and none of the safeguards found in the more civilized West.
No one has faith in a criminal justice system that torments the powerless while failing to get to the bottom of such cases as the Georgiy Gongadze murder, the Melnychenko tapes, the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, the crimes of the Leonid Kuchma era, the rigging of the 2004 presidential election…and on and on.
