The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine on Dec.8 night received a statement about a criminal offense committed by detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) during a search in the Ministry of Justice and seizure of documents without a court order, and launched criminal proceedings into the matter, the PGO spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, has said.
“The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine received a statement about a criminal offense signed by the Deputy Justice Minister… On this fact, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine entered data into the Single Register of Pre-Trial Investigations and launched the proceedings,” Lysenko wrote on his Facebook page on Dec.8.
First deputy head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice Natalia Bernatska earlier said at 7 a.m. this morning, when there was no one inside except the janitor, NABU officers broke into the ministry’s offices in Horodetskoho Street in Kyiv.
“They took from her [the janitor] the keys from the offices, entered one, where the ECHR [European Court of Human Rights] case files are stored, and locked themselves inside with the cleaning lady. They spent approximately an hour and a half there… After that NABU officers left the ministry through the back door… They left behind, on a desk, only a report about the search, which was illegal and is in violation of all principles of the criminal and criminal-proceedings code,” Bernatska said.
The search was carried out without a court order, without lawyers, without a video or audio record, she said. “And we don’t know which documents were effectively stolen from the Justice Ministry building, falsified, planted,” Bernatska said.
Parallel searches were carried out at the home and car of a ministry employee, the head of the secretariat of the government commissioner for ECHR affairs, she said.
This search was sanctioned by a court but no lawyers were present, she said.
The Ukrainian Justice Ministry has asked Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko to probe NABU officers on the subject of illegal searches and document seizures without a court order, the official said.
