You're reading: Kyiv court bans mobile operators from destroying data from 3 years ago

The Kyiv Pechersky District Court has granted the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office’s request and arrested all data storage devices belonging to Vodafone Ukraine, lifecell, Ukrtelecom and TriMob containing data on phone calls, SMS, travel and other client data for the period between January 18, 2014 and March 16, 2014.

According to some decisions made by this court on Jan. 17, 2017, which are published in the state register of court decisions, the request for the arrest was made by the special investigations department of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, which is conducting a pre-trial criminal investigation on the basis of a crime regarding the creation or administration of a criminal organization for the purpose of committing a grave or especially grave crime.

“The said criminal proceedings study… abuse of office by law enforcement officials in the period between November 2013 and February 2014, which led to massive casualties among protesters, organization of their premeditated murders. They also study the activities by top officials who were included in the criminal organization and the people associated with them, which led to the events that occurred in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and in the eastern part of the country in February-March 2014 and influenced their development,” the court decision said.

According to the prosecutors, the pre-trial investigation body currently cannot decide on the specific range of persons for objective reasons, information on phone connections will be relevant to the investigation and therefore all existing information for this period needs to be preserved.

“Illegal actions against some protesters on the entire territory of Ukraine are being investigated during the pre-trial investigation. It has to be sad that the said protests had over one million participants, but the number of representatives of public security units used by law enforcement agencies for curbing the protests alone exceeded 20,000,” the court decision said.