Court partly allows appeal by assaulted journalist

On 18 November the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Court of Appeal partly allowed an appeal lodged by the victim of assault, the Editor of the newspaper Kolomiya Herald, Vasyl Demyaniv

The court decided to allow the Prosecutor’s appeal in changed form and the appeal from the person convicted, Valery Kalyzhny and his lawyer, while partially allowing the appeal by Vasyl Demyaniv.

On 23 March 2010 Vasyl Demyaniv was attacked in Kolomiya, Ivano-Frankivsk region. he received serious head and brain injuries and a broken leg. He considered the attack to be linked to his professional activities, but the police called the attack an ordinary robbery attempt.

On 19 April 2011 the Kolomiya City-District Court convicted two men and sentenced them to 4 and 7.5 years

The police joined the case regarding the attack on the Editor of the Kolomiya Herald with two other cases. The court examined a case against three people, two of whom were accused of assaulting Vasyl Demyaniv, while all three were charged with robbery and hooliganism.

Vasyl Demyaniv in his appeal asserted that the case had been “examined superficially, one-sidedly and with flagrant infringements of legislation. It’s all distorted and does not correspond with the actual circumstances of the given case”.  He added that the judge had deliberately only considered dubious evidence convenient for the investigators and ignored the failings of the criminal investigation.

Vasyl Demyaniv is convinced that the men charged are not guilty of the assault on him and their guilt was not proven.

On 18 November the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of two men on one count, and against one of them on the other, and sent the case back for new examination in the same court but with different judges.

The Prosecutor had also considered that the original ruling should be quashed due to considerable infringements.  It says that any intent by the men convicted with respect to Demyaniv had not been proven.

Mr Demyaniv hopes that the new court examination will consider the evidence which he believes points to the assault being linked with his professional activities.

He spoke to an UNIAN correspondent while attending the March against Impunity organized by Ukrainian journalists to mark International Day against Impunity on 23 November (the photo is from there).

From a report at http://unian.net/ukr/news/news-470134.html  Photo from Telekritika