“I took my briefcase and left”

In early October the fall session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) will verify how Ukraine has been honoring its commitments to the Council of Europe, including the conclusion of the Gongadze case. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Sviatoslav Piskun is scheduled to deliver a progress report in Strasbourg on Oct. 3, and Parliamentary Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn will follow suit on Oct. 6. This statement was made by Serhiy Holovaty, a member of PACE’s standing parliamentary delegation, during a news conference held on Sept. 29. He added that in the Gongadze case, opponents have been removed both from the Prosecutor General’s Office — lawyers representing the murdered journalist’s mother Lesia Gongadze — and the investigative side, namely the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry whose work has been suspended. According to Holovaty, all those involved in the proceedings, including the prosecutor general, SPU leader Oleksandr Moroz, and Hryhoriy Omelchenko, chairman of the commission, had “put the situation into a deep-freeze.” Holovaty thinks there is nothing coincidental about Moroz’s statement about the need to conclude the investigation into Gongadze’s murder and submit the case to a court of law before the parliamentary elections.

Holovaty also said that he and lawyer Andriy Fedur want to meet with President Yushchenko, who “doesn’t know all the nuances of the case because he receives information from only one channel, from Piskun.” Fedur, who was also present at the news conference, said that there are a lot of questions concerning the materials of this case. He noted that now that the process has been suspended, “we will have three indicted militia officers whose culpability is extremely suspect.” The lawyer went on to say that, unless this is prevented, no one will ever be able to bring to justice those who actually planned, paid for, and carried out the murder.

The Day spoke with Serhiy HOLOVATY.

Why was the report of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Gongadze case postponed so many times?

S.H.: Actually, there was no report. I don’t even know how the issue got on the agenda in the first place. What happened was a violation of the procedures that regulate the activity of such ad hoc commissions of inquiry. We know that this type of report can be made public only after it is duly approved. As it was, the commission did not approve it; it didn’t even discuss it. Our last session took place a long time ago and the report was not adopted. In other words, Omelchenko’s presentation is not the commission’s report but his personal view of the matter, as one of 450 MPs.

So why did Mr. Omelchenko take the floor? By the way, Volodymyr Lytvyn personally moved to place the report on the Verkhovna Rada’s agenda.

S.H.: I don’t know how this happened during a meeting of the reconciliation commission. I believe that if Volodymyr Lytvyn was aware of the actual situation, he would never have insisted on issuing this so-called “report.” Omelchenko’s speech obviously played into someone’s hands. Now that the work has been “reported” and the materials handed over to the Office of the Prosecutor General, the commission has terminated its existence. The parliamentary commission has been terminated at this crucial moment, when the investigation — which in fact has not been completed, according to Sviatoslav Piskun — has been suspended and the case has been handed over to the courts. Since our last session on the case in April, a number of circumstances have emerged. Piskun also made several strong statements that contain many inaccuracies, details that not only contradict one another, but which also, I would say, attest to falsifications. At least, that is my impression. And at precisely this stage parliament loses control of the case. It’s unbelievable, but this is Omelchenko’s doing.

At what stage is the investigation, according to you?

S.H.: As the representative of Lesia Gongadze’s interests, I can say that the expert examination on which Georgy’s mother has been insisting all along has still not been done. The examination was supposedly commissioned somewhere in Germany, but the matter is at a standstill. Without the findings of forensic experts it would be absurd to talk about completing the investigation.

What will happen to the commission’s materials that have already been transferred to the Office of the Prosecutor General?

S.H.: I suspect that they will be thrown in the garbage. Anyway, I don’t know what documents precisely have been transferred. If they are what we heard from Omelchenko — a general discourse on sociopolitical subjects — they are of little value. In fact, the aggregate of the commission’s materials — only shorthand records — is a huge, including evidential, layer of the Gongadze case. If the report were properly composed, it would not have fit on a thousand pages — that’s how much factual material there was: concrete eyewitness accounts showing how the case was being fabricated, how testimonies were engineered and by whom. I will be using this data when I represent Mrs. Lesia Gongadze in court. I don’t know when the court hearing will begin, because the Office of the Prosecutor General is making every effort to limit the access of the victims — who have the right to familiarize themselves with the materials of the investigation — to these materials. All these years the prosecutor’s office has not been investigating the case but hiding it. I believe that our president is being deliberately led astray.

What was Lesia Gongadze’s reaction to this turn of events?

S.H.: I think she wasn’t expecting anything special from the commission. If this body functioned properly, the sessions would be held every week, and the commission members would be interested in hearing the mother’s opinion; they would hear what the defense counsel, Andriy Fedur, had to say, and so on. Then we would have obtained a concrete result. After all, MPs are not investigative officers; their goal is not to take direct part in ascertaining the circumstances; their job is to make sure that the investigative organs are doing their job conscientiously and professionally.

As for the lawyer, Fedur, his removal from the case was planned and well thought-out. The same is true of the Kolesnikov case. If you analyze its course, the fabricated accusations, you will conclude that the Kolesnikov saga is just a soap bubble.

Will Mrs. Gongadze be referring the case to the European Court of Human Rights?

S.H.: Yes, she will be challenging the state because of its inactivity in the investigation of the case. The documents that were being submitted at one time to the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry will come in handy here, if only for the sake of comparison: what the prosecutor’s office did and what was actually being done, and the reason for the delays.