This month, the European Court of Human Rights prevented Ukraine from backsliding in a major way. On September 18, it ordered the Ukrainian government to halt its efforts to access data from the cell phone of investigative journalist Natalia Sedletska for a month to give her an opportunity to file a full complaint to the ECHR.
The ECHR’s decision froze an earlier judgment by one of Kyiv’s district courts, which approved a request from the Prosecutor General’s office to allow it to review Sedletska’s cell phone data from July 19, 2016, through November 16, 2017. Sedletska is the editor and host of Schemes, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s hard-hitting weekly television show that exposes high-level corruption among government officials.
