You're reading: Lutsenko sues Ukrainian prosecutors in a US court

While Ukraine’s opposition figures face trials in Ukraine, local prosecutors involved in politically motivated cases against former government officials may face legal action in a court in the United States.

Ukraine’s ex-Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko filed a complaint in a U.S. court on Dec. 14, 2011 against Ukraine’s General Prosecutor Viktor Pshonka, his first deputy Renat Kuzmin, prosecutor Anton Zinchenko and investigator Serhiy Voychenko.

In the complaint Lutsenko accuses them of trying to eliminate him as one of the leaders of political opposition in Ukraine through an illegal arrest and arbitrarily prolonged detention.

“This systematic state policy and practice has been effectively carried through politically-motivated investigations, false accusations and charges, as well as through sham court proceedings and show trials of Plaintiff, as well as through prolonged arbitrary detention, cruel inhumane and degrading treatment, and other violations of his fundamental human rights recognized under customary international law,” reads the complaint, submitted to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Lutsenko’s American lawyers based their justification of the U.S. jurisdiction in this lawsuit under the the Aliens Torts Statute, which grants non-U.S. citizens the right to seek recource for violations of international law in American courts.

The officials affected could not be reached for comment immediately. Yuriy Boychenko, the spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, could not respond because he is not familiar with the lawsuit. He said he and his colleagues will have a response once they have studied the complaint.

The full text of the Lutsenko’s complaint in English can be accessed here.

Lutsenko was arrested on Dec. 26, 2010 and has been kept in detention ever since. He is accused of abuse of power as interior minister in allocating an apartment to his driver and illegally awarding him a pension.

He is also accused of illegally granting permission for surveillance of the driver of the Security Service of Ukraine’s former deputy head Volodymyr Satsiuk as part of a criminal investigation into the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, then a presidential candidate, in 2004.

Lutsenko has also been accused of misspending money during the celebration of Police Day in 2009. He has denied all the charges.

The trial of Lutsenko and other opposition figures are widely viewed in the West and within Ukraine as politically motivated. In turn, Ukrainian authorities claim local courts are independent and are free to take decisions based on law and nothing else.

Lutsenko’s U.S. lawyers also complained that Lutsenko is being kept in an overcrowded prison and that he is being deprived of food and water during lengthy court hearings, calling such treatment “inhumane” and “life threatening.” He also demands “to recover damages against the defendants in an amount to be determined at trial.”

According to the complaint, “if an animal was caged under similar circumstances, rather than a human being, those responsible for such treatment would be subject to criminal prosecution for cruelty to animals.”

Responding to questions regarding the lawsuit in a U.S. court, Lutsenko pointed out that unlike the European Court for Human Rights, in which he and Tymoshenko also filed complaints earlier last year alleging their detention was illegal, the lawsuit in the U.S. is filed not against the country at large but against specific individuals.

He stressed on Jan. 30 that “those who falsified the criminal case of the General Prosecutor’s Office and the judges who took unconstitutional decisions” may bear personal responsibility.

This is the second complaint against Ukrainian prosecutors filed in a court on the U.S. soil. In April 2011 Ukraine’s former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko filed a lawsuit against Dmytro Firtash, co-owner of RosUkrEnergo and an ally of President Viktor Yanukovych, in a court in New York.

Tymoshenko accused Firtash of manipulating an international arbitration court ruling to defraud Ukrainians of strategic gas reserves. Firtash has denied any wrongdoing.

Late that year, Tymoshenko amended the complaints with a number of other defendants, among them Pshonka, Kuzmin, former Security Service head and currently Finance Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, Energy Minister Yuriy Boyko. All have denied wrongdoing.

Both Tymoshenko and Lutsenko use a New York-based law firm, McCallion & Associates LLP, to represent them in U.S. courts.

Kyiv Post staff writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected].

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