Criminal investigations carried out by the Prosecutor General’s Office are being blocked starting from March 1 due to legal discrepancies linked to the creation of the State Investigation Bureau.
These include
corruption cases against disgraced former President Viktor Yanukovych and his
allies and into the murder of more than 100 protesters during the 2013-2014
EuroMaidan Revolution.
Corruption
investigations assigned to the National Anti-Corruption
Bureau still continue, however.
In January
President Petro Poroshenko signed a law on transferring investigative functions from the Prosecutor General’s Office
to the yet-to-be-created State Investigation Bureau on March 1. However, the
authorities have been dragging their feet on setting up the bureau.
As a result, the
Prosecutor General’s Office has lost its investigative functions, while the
bureau does not yet exist.
The Verkhovna
Rada has also failed to consider amendments allowing the Prosecutor General’s
Office to continue investigations before the bureau’s launch. The next
parliament meeting is scheduled for March 15.
The commission
for choosing the head of the bureau held its first meeting on March 1.
Courts are now
refusing to approve prosecutors’ investigative motions due to the ambiguous
wording of the law, a top official at the Prosecutor General’s Office told the
Kyiv Post.
Employees of the
Prosecutor General’s Office can technically continue investigations but “there
is the risk that all investigative actions will be recognized as illegal,” the
source said.
The issue became
so controversial that the Prosecutor General’s Office banned its employees from
officially commenting on it, the source said.
Oleksiy Donsky, a
prosecutor at the Prosecutor General’s Office, told Ukrainska Pravda that he
had filed seven motions with Kyiv’s Pechersk Court and all of them had been
rejected because his office had lost its investigative functions.
Sources cited by
Serhiy Leshchenko, a lawmaker from the Bloc of President Petro Poroshenko, also
confirmed the reports.
“Starting from
today – contrary to the speechwriter of the Prosecutor General’s Office –
investigations have been completely blocked at the Prosecutor General’s
Office,” Leshchenko wrote on Facebook on March 1.
Vladyslav
Kutsenko, a spokesman for the Prosecutor General’s Office, said on Feb. 29 that
the office would continue criminal investigations after
March 1.
He argued that
the law allowed the Prosecutor General’s Office to investigate the cases until
the State Investigation Bureau is launched.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
