Surely it’s illegal for a prosecutor in a major case to meet up with a key witness minutes before the trial to discuss future testimony, especially in what appears to have been an attempt to extract false testimony?
Yet this appears to be the modus operandi of Ukraine’s prosecutors.
This week, a journalist from TVi secretly filmed a top prosecutor meeting with a key witness in the case of former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko just 20 minutes before testimony in court.
The witness, Valeriy Melnyk, was important for the prosecution because during the pre-trial investigation he had testified that Lutsenko gave him a direct order to illegally hire his driver.
The prosecutor made it clear that he expected a repeat testimony in court, but actually Melnyk told the judge something else.
He said he had been questioned by the prosecutor for 12 hours when he was sick, possibly with cancer.
He said he required drugs urgently and was ready to say and sign anything to get back to treatment in the hospital.
This testimony, combined with the news report about pressure by prosecutor, should be enough to have the case against Lutsenko thrown out.
Yet the judge refused to take the news report into consideration or call the journalist as a witness, as requested by Lutsenko’s lawyer.
Several days later, General Prosecutor Viktor Pshonka was still reluctant to assess the actions of his prosecutor.
Ukraine’s prosecutors are powerful, dangerous and ridiculously unprofessional. The whole nation is paying the price.
