The European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling in its first-ever lawsuit that concerned occupation of the parts of eastern Ukraine by Russian-backed militants.
The plaintiff, Oleksandr Khlebik, sued Ukraine for infringing on his right to a fair trial in a reasonable time.
Khlebik, 43, is a former convict who in 2013-2016 was serving time for armed robbery in a prison located in a government-controlled part of Ukraine’s Luhansk Oblast.
In December 2015, while still in prison, Khlebik complained to the European Court of Human Rights that he couldn’t appeal his conviction because the Ukrainian court couldn’t access the case file, kept in Luhansk, a city under control of Russian-backed militant groups since spring of 2014.
The European Court of Human Rights on July 24 unanimously ruled that Ukraine’s authorities didn’t violate Khlebik’s rights. They didn’t intentionally restrict justice, and did all in their power to address the plaintiff’s situation, the ruling says.
However, the ruling arrived late.
As he was waiting for the international court to consider his case, Khlebik was released in 2016, thanks to a new law which considered the time a convict was kept in pretrial detention as double the actual calendar days a person spent there. Cancelled in June, the law enabled numerous Ukrainian convicts, including Khlebik, an early release from jail.
Khlebik, who was sentenced to eight years and nine months, was one of 7,700 convicts who benefited from the law. After spending three years in pretrial detention and two years in jail, he walked free.
Still, the ruling of the European Court was highly publicized in Ukraine as the first case that regarded the occupation of eastern Ukraine that was considered by the European Court of Human Rights.
Ukrainian government lost control of parts of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts in spring and summer of 2014, when the Russian-backed militants took over a number of the cities and towns, including both oblast capitals, leading to an ongoing armed conflict with the government forces that got more than 10,000 people killed, a lot of them civilians.
Khlebik, along with several co-defendants, was convicted of banditry and armed robbery in April 2013, a year before the separatists took over the east.
He was sentenced to eight years and nine months in prison by the Alchevsk Court in Luhansk Oblast.
Khlebik appealed his sentence to the court in Luhansk, but the examination of the appeal got obstructed by the erupting conflict and the loss of the government control of the city.
At first, when a Ukrainian court was still operating in Luhansk in 2014, Khlebik couldn’t be brought to the hearing due to the conflict. At one point, a scheduled video conference hearing of his case was canceled due to electricity blackout.
Later, as the court had to relocate to the government-controlled area, the hearing became impossible because the case file was left in Luhansk.
In 2015, he complained to the Court of Appeal of Ukraine about the delay in the examination of his appeal several times, but the complaints were rejected by the court.
Following the rejections, Khlebik made an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights on Dec. 18, 2015.
The court took into consideration Ukrainian authorities’ efforts to access the case documents, as well as the impossibility of conducting a new investigation due to the evidence being inaccessible.
