Yanukovych and his deputy justice minister to be tried for seizing state power in 2010
Fugitive ex-president Viktor Yanukovych and former deputy minister of justice Volodymyr Bohatyr will be tried in Ukraine. They are accused of usurping state power in 2010, the Office of the Prosecutor General said in a statement.
- Subscribe to LIGA.net in English on Twitter
The agency does not name names, but according to the positions of the persons involved, the time and the crimes committed by them, the case concerns Yanukovych and Bohatyr.
It is noted that the pre-trial investigation has been completed and the indictment in the criminal proceedings regarding the usurpation of state power has been sent to the court (Part 1 of Article 109 and Part 5 of Article 27, Part 1 of Article 109 of the Criminal Code).
The ex-president is accused of the seizure of power, and the ex-deputy minister of justice faces charges of aiding in this.
As part of the proceedings, the circumstances of these and other persons committing actions aimed at seizing state power in September-October 2010 were investigated.
The investigation found that this occurred by reinstating provisions of the June 28, 1996 Constitution of Ukraine in an unconstitutional manner.
This reinstatement resulted in an "illegal expansion" of presidential powers that infringed on the lawful authority of Ukraine's legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, the department claims.
The accused have been hiding from the investigative bodies and the court for a "long time".
The State Bureau of Investigation conducted a pre-trial investigation under a special (in absentia) procedure.
According to the Constitution of Ukraine, the Verkhovna Rada can make changes to it at the request of the president or at least one-third of the MPs from the constitutional composition (300 out of 450 members) of the Verkhovna Rada.
According to this, the decision to confirm or cancel the constitutional reform of 2004 could be made exclusively by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine.
On September 5, 2017, then-Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko reported on the investigation of this case by the Department of Special Investigations of the PGO.
Since 2007, Bohatyr served as the Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine: first under Oleksandr Lavrynovych, and then under Mykola Onishchuk.
From March 2010 to March 18, 2011, he was Deputy Minister of Justice Lavrynovych. Since 2014, Bohatyr has been registered in the Register of lawyers of foreign countries practicing law on the territory of the Russian Federation in matters of Ukrainian law.