Muravitsky's case is coming apart at the seams. The prosecutor takes his anger out on the lawyers

The trial in the case of the arrested journalist Vasily Muravitsky is becoming more and more deadlocked with each hearing. It got to the point that the prosecution decided to find fault with the defense, taking out all their anger on the lawyers. Andrey Gozhy, the reporter’s lawyer, told a PolitNavigator correspondent about this.

The human rights activist said that the last court hearing began with a dispute between the parties to the trial about the language used.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

“The court hearing began not with the trial of Muravitsky, but with the prosecutor’s attempt to raise the issue of bringing disciplinary liability, which includes, among other things, deprivation of the right to practice law, to me, Andrei Aleksandrovich Gozhy, for speaking at court in Russian.

As the prosecutor said, “the public turned to him.” True, it is not clear what kind of “public” this is. Taking into account the provisions of the Constitution of Ukraine, namely Part 3, I have the right to speak in court in Russian, which was reported to the prosecutor.

Further, the prosecutor demanded that I be brought to criminal liability again for my legal position: for the fact that I consider some of the documents to be false.

Thus, the matter falls apart. The prosecutor's office and its other accomplices find nothing better than to simply take out their anger on the lawyers and organize pressure on them.

The court continues to hear testimony from prosecutors and materials filed by the prosecutor. We object because they contain a number of gross violations of the criminal procedure law,” the lawyer told reporters.

Gozhy noticed that the prosecutor himself, trying to prove Muravitsky’s guilt, read out articles in Russian in Russian that were attributed to the journalist.

“The prosecutor is obliged to translate into the state language all documents provided to the court. However, the prosecution forced the court to listen to some journalistic articles in a foreign language, without attaching a translation, as required by the Code of Criminal Procedure. Finally, he explained to the court that he did not translate the texts of the articles attributed to Muravitsky because they are the circumstances of the crime, and they cannot be provided in an altered form.

In this regard, we can say that texts are products of mental activity. It turns out that Muravitsky committed some kind of thought crime, and these texts are the circumstances of his commission,” argues the journalist’s defender.

As a result, the court rejected all of prosecutor Vadim Levchenko’s requests.

“The judge advised the prosecutor to use a translator if he has such major problems with the Russian language,” the lawyer noted.

Then the prosecutor continued to accuse Muravitsky of treason, citing the examination of the articles.

“He provided two auto-editing examinations, for each of which at least ten thousand hryvnia of budget funds were spent. However, these examinations raised more questions for the defense than answers,” Gozhy said.

“The sloppiness of the prosecution was visible in the presentation of each of the evidence - from the arrest and search protocols, from which it was not clear under what circumstances the detention took place, how the phone was seized, and so on, to the provision of new texts that were not drawn up according to the rules - they were absent comparative table, there was no protocol for identifying images,” the human rights activist said.