Austrian journalist Christian Wehrschuetz filed documents to challenge his ban from Ukraine with the District Administrative Court of Kyiv on March 26, the journalist’s lawyer has told the Kyiv Post.
Wehrschuetz is challenging a decision by Ukraine’s SBU security service, his lawyer Maryna Parinova said.
The Austrian journalist, who has been head of Austrian public broadcaster’s ORF bureau in Kyiv since 2015, was banned from entering the country for one year on March 6.
The SBU said in a post on Facebook on March 9 that Wehrschuetz had been banned from the country “due to the need to ensure the journalist’s safety.”
However, Wehrschuetz’s lawyers said the “SBU’s decision was associated with dissatisfaction from the part of the Ukrainian authorities with his reports.” Wehrschuetz first learned about the ban when he received a call from the Austrian Foreign Ministry, which had been informed about the ban by the SBU via the Austrian embassy in Kyiv.
The case is now being considered by the court.
According to Parinova, the SBU’s decision was “absolutely arbitrary and contrary to the law.”
She said there was no mention of any threat to the journalist’s life in the official notification of the ban – rather, it read that Wehrschuetz’s coverage of events in Ukraine posed a threat to the national security of Ukraine.
“This is an act of censorship” as the real “reason for the ban was the professional activity of the journalist, because it was his work, his evaluation of events as a journalist, which lay behind (the SBU’s decision),” Parinova said.
Parinova said she would ask the court to consider the case in an expedited procedure, under which the parties to the dispute (the SBU and Wehrschuetz) submit documents and answer each other’s arguments without actually having to attend court hearings.
According to regulations, the consideration of the case in the expedited procedure is to be completed within two months.
The case has attracted the attention of politicians in Austria, Ukraine, and the European Union. Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl condemned the ban and called for its immediate lifting. In contrast, Olga Chervakova, a Ukrainian lawmaker and deputy head of the parliamentary committee on the freedom of speech, accused Wehrschuetz of reporting on Ukraine “while widely using the clichés of Kremlin propaganda.”
The arguments in the court are likely to center around the way the SBU came to its decision. The SBU will have justify its two contradictory arguments – that Wehrschuetz is a threat to national security, and that there is a threat to his life in Ukraine.
The District Administrative Court of Kyiv ruled on March 27 in a similar case on the banning of Russian citizen Fedor Dobronravov.
According to a posting on the court’s website, the court ruled to cancel the SBU’s decision to ban Dobronravov, as it had been taken unlawfully.
