A Kyiv court on June 3 banned journalists from staging a rally near President Viktor Yanukovych’s residence. The rally was scheduled for June 6 – celebrated as journalist’s day in Ukraine –to protest media censorship in the country.
The Kyiv Regional
Administrative Court’s ban marks the third consecutive year that journalists were
denied peaceful assembly in the village of Novi Petrivtsi north of Kyiv, where the
president lives on a palatial estate called Mezhyhirya.
According
to the judgment published by Ukrayinska Pravda deputy editor Serhiy Leshchenko,
the court banned the gathering of journalists scheduled for 9 a.m.-11 a.m. on
June 6. The decision was based on a letter from the local police department,
explaining that the rally “can result in gross violation of public order and
safety of road users.”
In fact,
only Yanukovych’s cortege is known to pass through the entrance of the residence.
The journalist from the Stop Censorship group that applied for the permit,
Artem Sokolenko, said the judicial ruling will be appealed.
Soon after
being elected president four years ago, on June 4, 2010, Yanukovych made a
public promise to invite journalists to his luxurious residence. But in June
2011, only six, government-friendly journalists received an invitation: four
from TV channels, a print reporter and an online journalist.
That same
year, a local court banned a group of journalists from gathering near
Yanukovych’s residence. They wanted to remind him of his promise and to protest
rising censorship.
“This is
not the right place for a rally. That’s the private sector, and people go to
work,” explained Rodion Starenky, head of the Novi Petrivtsi village council,
who asked the court to ban the rally in 2011.
No court
since has sanctioned rallies near Mezhyhirya.
However, each
year journalists gather near the residence to oversee the execution of the court’s
judgment.
“We planned
the action against censorship, but as it was banned by the court again, the
reporters will come again to control the execution of the judgment, hoping that
their repeated pleas to stop the collapse of democracy will be heard by the guarantor
of the Constitution,” Leshchenko of Ukrayinska Pravda told Kyiv Post.
“There is
no reason to ban such things, that’s unconstitutional… These prohibitions look
clearly unlawful,” said Andriy Mamaliga, a human rights lawyer who has defended
high-profile Ukrainian politicians in court and won a court case in
Strasbourg’s European human rights court.
Officially,
a company Tantalit LLC leases more than 120 hectares of the 140-hectare Mezhyhirya
estate. Tantalit belongs to offshore
companies. Yanukovych officially rents
only 1.8 ha of the land. The president has refused to say who really is behind
Tantalit, which has fueled suspicions of high-level corruption.
In April, the president’s spokeswoman Daria Chepak said Yanukovych
believes rallies near his residence should only be held within the law.
“The Ukrainian president believes that such
events… should be regulated exclusively in the legislative field. However,
the head of state is convinced that the legal settlement of the issue of
peaceful assembly in Ukraine needs to be improved,” she wrote to Ukrayinska
Pravda online newspaper.
Kyiv Post staff writer Kateryna Kapliuk can be reached
at [email protected].
