You're reading: ​New prosecutor general seeks arrest of coalition enemies in the judiciary

Just two days into the job, Ukraine's new Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin, is asking parliament to strip three of Kyiv's judges of their immunity from prosecution so that he can arrest them. The judges, Oksana Tzarevich, Viktor Kytsyuk and Sehiy Vovk, are all members of the infamous Pechersk district court in central Kyiv.

The Pechersk court
has seen some of Ukraine’s most controversial court rulings handed down,
including the release of former Berkut commander
Dmytro Sadovnyk on bail after he was accused of
ordering lethal attacks on Euromaidan demonstrators in February 2014.

Sadovnyk disappeared soon afterwards and has since been placed on Ukraine’s
wanted list.

But critics suspect long-time
lawman Shokin, who first became a deputy prosecutor in 2002, is actually repaying
some of the 318 votes in the Verkhovhna Rada that approved his appointment as
Prosecutor General.


The three judges targeted by Shokin all stand accused of presiding over cases
described by the European Union as politically-motivated trials. Those trials
targeted former President Viktor Yanukovych’s opponents, such as Yulia
Tymoshenko and Yuriy Lutsenko, many of whom now form the ruling coalition.

“This move has little to do with
respecting the rule of law,” said Arkadiy Buschenko, Executive Director at
Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union. “I suspect the new prosecutor is just trying to
fulfil the requests or demands of the ruling parties.”

Judge Vovk was on the panel for the first trial of former Minister of Internal
Affairs Lutsenko, which led to ex-Minister being sentenced to four years in
prison and serving more than two.

In 2013 Judges Tsarevich and
Kitsyuk led the court investigation which implicated already imprisoned former
Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in the 1996 murder of businessman and
parliamentarian Yevhen Shcherban, formally notifying her that she was a
suspect. The case eventually collapsed for lack of evidence.

Shokin’s appeal to parliament accuses the judges of advancing an “an unlawful
ruling of serious consequences committed for mercenary motives or other
personal interests,” under Article 375 of Ukraine’s criminal code.

He has also requested that Ukraine’s High Commission for the Qualification of
Judges dismiss the trio, informing them that a criminal investigation is
underway in the Kyiv prosecutor’s office. But Buschenko sees this not as an
attempt to enforce justice, but to consolidate control over the remaining
pro-Yanukovych judges.

“I see no difference between this
government and the last,” Buschenko told the Kyiv Post. “The real intention is
to have a judiciary controlled by the executive and by the parliament.”

After Prosecutor General Vitaliy
Yarema’s dismissal earlier this week, many were surprised by the appointment of
Shokin, an old-school operator who lacks both the motivation and dynamism to
shake up Ukraine’s most rotten and corrupted law-enforcement agency.


“Shokin has been a deputy of Yarema
for a long time and also shares the responsibility for a lack of results, like
Yarema,” said Oleh Lyashko, leader of the populist Radical Party.


Kyiv Post editor Maxim Tucker can be reached at [email protected] or via twitter @MaxRTucker