A rare verdict

By Mykola SEMENA, The Day, Simferopol

The central district court of Simferopol closed the case whose examination had lasted nearly half a year and sentenced the leader of one of the few but most scandalous Crimean NGOs, the so-called “Coordinating Council of Russian Organizations of Sevastopol and Tavrida,” Volodymyr Tiunin to 2.5 years of imprisonment with a respite of a sentence for one year for the incitement of ethnic hatred. Besides, the court charged him to compensate 11,000 hryvnias of legal costs and prohibited him from being engaged in politics for three years. The Ukrainian court practice has very few verdicts according to this article. There is probably one more significant precedent: a few months ago the Crimean district administrative court sentenced and deported the leader of Cossacks’ community “Sobol” related to “Coordinating Council” Vitalii Khramov (who turned out to be a Russian citizen) for the same crime. He was charged for the incitement of ethnic and religious hatred (according to the point 1, article 161 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code).

The criminal case according to the second part of the article 161 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code was initiated last February. The reason for this was that in July 2010 during the meeting of the Cossacks’ community “Sobol” Tiunin afforded utterances that were not true to facts and insulted national dignity of communities living in the Crimea. The president of the Global Congress of the Crimean Tatars Refat Chubarov said that he knows Tiunin as one of “very hot-spirited Crimean politicos.” Chubarov told the journalist of The Day that he was hoping that just verdicts concerning this article will finally help the society get rid of its most shameful phenomena. Probably, the time when it was possible to incite ethnic hatred between people of different nationalities with impunity, especially in the Crimea that often happens at meetings and in papers, is coming up to the end.