PACE and Podolsky

Foreign politicians are rushing to see Yulia Tymoshenko on the eve of Euro-2012. What arouses the concern of international community representatives, who are calling almost daily upon President Viktor Yanukovych to alter the situation, is, above all, her health. According to the website of Ukraine’s State Penitentiary Service, the opposition leader, who was recently transferred to a Kharkiv clinic, is going to have three meetings in May. She was allowed to see Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite on May 11; the US Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft and Thomas O. Melia, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, on May 14; as well as Marietta de Pourbaix-Lundin and Mailis Reps, PACE co-rapporteurs for Ukarine, on May 16.

Seizing this opportunity, journalist and public figure Oleksii Podolsky has asked in a letter to Ms. Reps to meet him. His aim is to tell the Council of Europe representative about the events around some other high-profile cases in Ukraine.

“As an aggrieved party, I have been trying for almost 12 years to make sure that justice be done in the Gongadze-Yeliashkevych-Podolsky case,” Podolsky’s letter says among other things, “the case about the systemic use of violence by Ukraine’s law-enforcement bo­dies against political and public opponents, about the government’s arbitrary rule and corruption under the presidency of Leonid Kuchma.

“I am sincerely grateful to civil society and European institutions for showing solidarity with us, which was and still is perhaps the only viable factor that forces the Ukrai­nian authorities at least to pretend to investigate this case.

“Unfortunately, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe rapporteurs, who visited Ukraine to monitor the fulfillment of the commitments made in connection with the investigation of high-profile criminal cases which were the subject of numerous PACE re­solutions, have never met me in these 12 years.

“I think my observations and evidence about the performance of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office and the courts that looked into various aspects of this case, as well as the facts that you do not know, can be of use for the PACE rapporteurs, for the formation of an unbiased opinion of what is going on in Ukraine.”

We got in touch with Mr. Podolsky and asked if there had been a response from the PACE rapporteur to the letter.

“There has been no answer so far,” Podolsky says, “perhaps for technical reasons. I sent a letter to her and posted it on my blog a month ago. I am still waiting for an answer. I don’t think there is a reason why she cannot meet me.

“I do have things to tell her. All the more so that the Europeans are drawing information from various sources, including the opposition, which interpret our case as they please. I want to tell Ms. Reps about the way the case has been handled over the past few years, about what I read in the case documents, and, in a word, to prove on the basis of facts that nobody is going to try to track down those who masterminded the crime. The latter continue to be protected. I want to say that, first of all, one must solve the crimes committed by law-enforces in these cases. There are crimes galore. The assassination of [former Interior Minister] Kravchenko was the apex of all those crimes. Ms. Reps is an experienced lawyer. I think she will understand me.

“If Ms. Reps wants to know the truth, she must be interested in meeting me. I also want to tell her about the current trial of Pukach. They are now summoning witnesses – some of them show up and others do not. Most of them are policemen who admit that they conducted surveillance over Gongadze and me. But all this is just a technical question. Next to come are real witnesses who will speak to the point. Incidentally, we are going to demand that ex-president Kuchma and parliament speaker Lytvyn be interrogated, too. Besides, I will tell Ms. Reps about the shameful incident, when it turned out that Judge Melnyk had taken part in framing the Yeliashkevych case, when I challenged him, but he was told to continue hearing the case. Europe does not fully know and understand this.”