Democracy On Trial

KIEV, Ukraine -- Brawling broke out this week at the trial of Ukraine’s former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, when one of her more vocal supporters refused to leave the courtroom in Kiev.

Mrs Tymoshenko, who is accused of illegally concluding a gas-price agreement with Russia in 2009, even stood on a bench to film the incident on her mobile phone.

Such farcical scenes have become almost routine in a trial that is being watched closely in Europe and America for signs of selective and politicised justice.

Mrs Tymoshenko is no ordinary defendant.

She was a leading light in the 2004 “orange revolution”. She has twice served as prime minister. She is now Ukraine’s most prominent opposition politician.

Only last year she narrowly lost a tight presidential election to Viktor Yanukovich, a former mechanic who was kept out of power by the orange revolution.

Mr Yanukovich has used his first year as president mainly to cement his own power at home, though he has also tried (not always to great effect) to repair Ukraine’s relations with Russia.

Mrs Tymoshenko’s case, which has been heard on and off in a stuffy courtroom in Ukraine’s capital over the past month, offers a lively but disturbing insight into the country.

Mr Yanukovich’s government has framed the trial as part of a new anti-corruption drive, insisting that it is not revenge for past political slights.

Nor, it claims, is it about torpedoing Mrs Tymoshenko’s chances of competing in a parliamentary election next year or in the presidential vote due in 2015.

Yet Mrs Tymoshenko is not facing charges of straightforward graft.

Rather, it seems as if her political record and managerial competence are on trial.

Specifically, the allegations centre on her second stint as prime minister, from 2007 to 2010, when she was called on to resolve one of Ukraine’s perennial gas disputes with Russia, from which Ukraine buys most of the energy that it needs to keep its creaking Soviet-era economy going.

According to state prosecutors, Mrs Tymoshenko exceeded her authority by pushing the gas deal through without consulting her own government, committing a cardinal procedural error.

To compound her alleged sins, they accuse her of striking a bad bargain for Ukraine, losing the country almost $200m.

She is no stranger either to Ukraine’s sharp-elbowed judicial system or to gas: she spent 42 days in jail in 2001 in a standoff with the then president, and in the previous decade she was known as the “gas princess”.

Mrs Tymoshenko denies all the charges.

Endowed with a flair for the theatrical, she has called the judge a monster and the trial a farce, and merrily flouted court protocol.

For his part, the judge has seemed in a hurry, giving her lawyers inadequate time to study thousands of pages of documents.

Mrs Tymoshenko has filed appeal after unsuccessful appeal and changed her legal advisers twice.

She has likened the proceedings to a Stalin-era show trial, and accused Mr Yanukovich of trying to turn Ukraine into a Soviet-style prison camp.

Although that is hyperbole, it is hard to shake off the impression that her trial is politically motivated.

Several of Mrs Tymoshenko’s former ministers have been arrested and jailed. She faces a series of other criminal charges besides the present case.

Indeed, Mr Yanukovich’s credibility and commitment to democracy are in the dock alongside her.

If at the end of it, he is seen to have used the judicial system to settle personal political scores, his espousal of democracy will look hollow.

As it is, a trial designed to enhance his authority, risks undermining it.

Were Mrs Tymoshenko to be jailed (she faces a maximum sentence of ten years), she is likely to emerge as a political martyr.

And Mr Yanukovich would be stuck with precisely the label that he has worked so hard to shed: that of a neo-Soviet autocrat.

Medvedev calls for justice

Calling on prosecutors and investigators to get their act together, President Dmitry Medvedev has spoken out forcefully against judicial abuses, just days after the acquittal of three suspects in the murder trial of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
The acquittal by a jury of brothers Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov and former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov on Feb. 19 sent out shock waves, and has left prosecutors scrambling to explain how the investigation to find the person who ordered Politkovskaya's assassination in October 2006 will go forward.
Medvedev's comments, at a meeting with prosecutors and investigators, are his second intervention into judicial affairs this year.
His meeting with Novaya Gazeta editor Dmitry Muratov last month - weeks after the killing of the paper's lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova - sent a powerful signal that the president wanted the investigations into journalist murders given a high priority.
The acquittal of the three men accused of involvement in Polit­kovskaya's killing and Medvedev's condemnation of law enforcement failings has highlighted an unprecedented consensus among both rights activists and the government about the disarray of the country's justice system.
"We must maximally rule out factors of pressure on the courts, on the jury," Medvedev said at Wednesday's collegium meeting with prosecutors and investigators. "The situation in our country is not sterile, we know that [courts] are intimidated and given money."
Medvedev spared no one in a stern demand to get the justice system working adequately - both law enforcement and the courts should use legislation to get their act together, he said.
"All the members of the law enforcement organs that are involved in preliminary investigations should work with the jury system in mind. It's time to learn how to do this, instead of talking about how nice it was when this legal institution was not in place," Medvedev said, referring to criticism of the jury system.
Medvedev has repeatedly vowed to get tough on corruption since his inauguration in May, but Wednesday's statements suggested that both Medvedev and the prosecutors were dismayed at the judicial dead end the murder trial had encountered.
Prosecutor General Yury Chaika seemed to acknowledge the flaws in the Politkovskaya trial that until recently were mostly left to rights activists and Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where Politkovskaya worked, to highlight. "We should really investigate this criminal case," Chaika said at Wednesday's collegium. "The Investigative Committee will begin addressing the failures of the investigation that have become apparent in the course of the hearings."
The man who prosecutors suspect of carrying out the Politkovskaya assassination, Rustam Makhmudov, is still at large, while prosecutors have not said who they suspect of ordering her murder.
After the acquittal, Judge Yevgeny Zubov ruled that the case be referred back to the Investigation Committee at the Prosecutor General's Office and said that the verdict could be appealed within a 10-day period.
On Wednesday, the head of the Investigative Committee, a semi-autonomous body under the aegis of the Prosecutor General's Office, conceded that investigators had not done their job properly.
"We have had failures that were caused by our own shortcomings," Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin told Medvedev. "A good example is the investigation into the murder of Anna Politkovskaya."
Bastrykin explained that his committee had evidence proving that the Makhmudov brothers were guilty as early as August 2007. "But we failed to convince the jury," he said.
Earlier, such statements were more typical coming from Politkovskaya's son, Ilya, and Novaya Gazeta deputy editor Sergei Sokolov, who said last week that more evidence should have been presented in court.
"Those people who walked free today - I think they were involved in the murder. We continue to insist this."
During the latest Politkovskaya trial, Novaya Gazeta representatives and rights campaigners complained that links between the suspects to Federal Security Service officers were not being followed up sufficiently by prosecutors.
The Politkovskaya family lawyer, Anna Stavitskaya, said that she would not appeal the jury's verdict, adding that she trusted the jury.
Igor Trunov, chairman of the presidium of the Collegiate of Lawyers, welcomed Medvedev's comments, but said there was only so much that statements by top government officials could achieve on their own. "I can't imagine how they would affect the investigation," he said by telephone.
"It is a prolonged process - the statements should influence lawmaking, should rid legislation of gaps. But if collecting evidence could be activated by administrative means only, we would have been able to achieve a lot," he said.
"We expect action, not statements," he said, of prosecutors. "They need to provide results."