Reporters Without Borders is deeply shocked by a Kiev appeal court decision yesterday that will have the effect of preventing any further attempt to identify the senior government officials who were almost certainly behind online journalist Georgiy Gongadze’s murder in September 2000.

Yesterday’s appeal court ruling upheld a decision by the prosecutor’s office to change the legal definition of the killing from “commissioned murder” to the less serious “murder on verbal orders,” which carries a lower sentence and limits criminal responsibility to the person who gave the verbal order and the person who carried it out.

The ruling will have been welcomed by the political associates of Leonid Kuchma (who was president in 2000) as the person alleged to have given the verbal order for Gongadze’s murder was the then interior minister, Yuri Kravchenko, who conveniently died in mysterious fashion in 2005.

Unless a separate investigation is launched into tape recordings that could implicate other very senior officials, they will no longer have anything to fear. This is a massive blow to all those who were still hoping that light would be shone on all aspects of the case.

Gongadze family lawyer Valentyna Telychenko told Reporters Without Borders that the appeal court clearly reached a partial and illegal decision under pressure. Reporters Without Borders shares her view and supports her plan to appeal to the High Commission for Ukrainian Court Charges, the only body capable of reversing the decision.

Yesterday’s ruling was preceded by a series of irregularities in the investigation since December. The Gongadze family’s lawyers are still waiting to have access to the prosecution files although Oleksiy Pukach, the interior ministry intelligence officer who is accused of carrying out the murder, has been studying them for the past three months.

It is vital that the Ukrainian judicial system should finally start to behave in an impartial manner.