Investigations in the murders of more than 100 EuroMaidan protesters and graft cases against top officials against ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and his top officials have effectively stopped, Sergii Gorbatuk, head of the unit for in absentia investigations at the Prosecutor General’s Office, told Interfax Ukraine on Nov. 20.
The statement comes ahead of Nov. 21, the anniversary of the beginning of the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution.
The investigations halted because, under the law, all investigations were to be transferred by the Prosecutor General’s Office to the State Investigation Bureau, he added. However, the bureau has not been created yet, and the Verkhovna Rada has failed to adopt legislation to extend the Nov. 20 deadline.
“The work is paralyzed because investigators of the Prosecutor General’s Office cannot open criminal cases, and (the State Investigation Bureau) has not been created yet, and there’s no single opinion on how to act in this situation and who must investigate those cases,” he said.
Meanwhile, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine also said on Nov. 15 that it would have to stop all of its ongoing graft investigations if the Prosecutor General’s Office transfered its cases to the NABU by the Nov. 20 deadline set by Ukrainian law, unless parliament immediately passes amendments extending the deadline. The Verkhovna Rada has failed to do that.
The Prosecutor General’s Office is supposed to transfer about 3,500 cases to the NABU, which has only 200 detectives. This would effectively overload the bureau with work.
In another development, Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky failed to appoint a prosecutor for the NABU case into alleged graft at the National Agency for Preventing Corruption for a week, blocking the investigation. Eventually Kholodnytsky asked Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko to take the case from the NABU and transfer it to the presidentially controlled Security Service of Ukraine, and Lutsenko sent it to the SBU. Critics saw these actions as an effort to bury the case and cover up for NAPC officials.
President Petro Poroshenko is also set to sign amendments to procedural codes that could make any criminal investigations impossible, according to critics.
The NABU said on Nov. 15 that, if Poroshenko signs the recent amendments to the procedural codes, this would lead to “the collapse of the work of the NABU and other investigative agencies, and paralyze Ukraine’s law enforcement system.”
Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s executive board, on Nov. 20 published what he says is evidence for the falsification of the procedural code amendments.
The amendments, which were passed by parliament on Oct. 3, may kill any corruption investigations due to the limited terms of investigation and other hurdles they impose.
According to the initial text of an amendment initiated by Radical Party lawmaker Andriy Lozovy, prosecutors would have to file notices of suspicion for suspects in criminal cases within six months for grave crimes, and within three months for crimes of medium severity. Moreover, all cases must be sent to trial within two months after a notice of suspicion is filed, according to the amendment.
People’s Front lawmaker Leonid Yemets said on Oct. 5 that the final version of the codes envisaged a term of one-and-a-half years for grave crimes, and one year for crimes of medium severity. The courts will be able to block investigations by refusing to extend their terms, and their decisions to close cases cannot be appealed.
Critics say the new terms are still insufficient. Gorbatuk said that if they are applied to already-open cases, the amendments may also lead to the closure of ongoing major corruption and murder investigations.
According to the amendments, which have yet to be signed by Poroshenko, corruption cases can also be blocked through appeals against notices of suspicion. The amendments also put an end to the judiciary’s transparency by allowing judges to ban even open trials from being filmed.
Moreover, the amendments were adopted amid numerous procedural and legal violations, since the lawmakers were not given the final text to read and thus did not know what they were voting for, while some lawmakers were filmed voting for others, which is illegal.
“These amendments were falsified,” Gorbatuk said in October. “The Verkhovna Rada didn’t vote for them. To assume that they will become law in this manner would mean a collapse of the law in the state, and of the state itself.”
