The Pecherskyi District Court, Kyiv has denied the application of an investigation officer of the Security Service of Ukraine asking to limit the period to read criminal case files for a person suspected of having committed an extremely serious crime.

During the hearing of the application, Drozdova & Partners Law Firm Senior Partner Mr Mykhailo Honcharov brought the court’s attention to a number of violations of the provisions of procedural law, which have ultimately provided a basis for the dismissal of the prosecuting attorney’s application asking that the period for the client to read ten bundles of the case files be limited to 24 hours.

‘The suspect is a foreign national and demonstrates a total lack of Ukrainian. He speaks few words in Russian and had an incomplete view of the process,’ the advocate comments on the facts of the case. ‘However, only some general documents of all the criminal case files were translated into his mother tongue.’

Mr Honcharov drew the court’s focus to the fact that the suspect was ignorant about what evidence supporting the suspicion have been collected. The client has had no opportunity to read those materials because they were not translated, constituting a violation of the provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Further, the client was not provided with proper conditions to read the case files and, as it has turned out, the materials were never transferred for translation to translators.