You're reading: Tymoshenko lodges complaint at European Court of Human Rights

Batkivschyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko has lodged a complaint at the European Court of Human Rights regarding the illegality of her detention during the investigation of a criminal case opened against her, Tymoshenko's lawyer and BYT-Batkivschyna faction member Serhiy Vlasenko has said.

"It’s a complaint, rather than a lawsuit. We are asking [the court] to recognize that subparagraph C, paragraph 1, Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights was violated during the opening of a criminal case against Tymoshenko," he said at a press conference on Wednesday.

"If we translate all these legal terms into a normal human language, we can say that subparagraph C, paragraph 1, Article 5 foresees that a person can be detained if there is sufficient evidence or reasonable suspicion that he or she committed an offence," he explained.

Vlasenko recalled that the Prosecutor General’s Office had detained Tymoshenko on May 24.

"Accordingly, they detained her without any sufficient grounds, because the case was filed on far-fetched grounds. And we are asking the court to establish this… The point is that there was no reason at all to open any criminal cases against Tymoshenko, and these criminal cases were on trumped-up grounds. The criminal cases were falsified while they were drafted, opened and investigated," he said.

Vlasenko said that the complaint had been lodged at the European Court of Human Rights on June 21 and that the court was expected soon to consider this case.