Three young men are to be released under the amnesty law for political prisoners after spending almost 4 years in custody charged with a crime that nobody believes they committed. The first young man was taken into custody the morning after President Yanukovych on nationwide TV demanded arrests within the week

In a very welcome move, a Dnipropetrovsk district court has released two men held in custody for two years in connection with the 2012 bomb blasts in the centre of Dnipropetrovsk which injured around 30 people

The lawyer of Lev Prosvirnin, one of two men charged, very controversially, with being accomplices in the bomb blasts in Dnipropetrovsk on April 27, 2012, reports that vital evidence is missing

Please endorse an appeal for a review of the case of three young men sentenced to long prison terms over the Zaporizhya Church bomb. Nobody believed them guilty, everybody – that they were “doomed” because of Viktor Yanukovych’s role in their arrest

Ukraine’s new leaders have passed a decree releasing not only people facing prosecution over the last three months’ protests as political prsioners, but also the Vasilkiv “terrorist” prisoners and the Pavlychenko father and son. Other cases, no less worrying, have unfortunately not been included

Road Control lawyer,Viktor Smaliy has not been released under the so-called ’amnesty laws’ although the charges against him seem deliberately aimed at sending a message to lawyers defending peaceful protesters, as well as part of a general campaign against the civic watchdog Road Control

The latest bill trying to sneak in the retrograde norms of the Jan 16 laws comes with formidable patrons, including the president, Viktor Yanukovych and claims to be about ‘safeguarding judges’ independence”

There are already concerns regarding prosecutions the ‘hostage law’ will NOT cover, and deep frustration that Berkut and the authorities’ impunity for grave rights infringements have been effectively accepted

IWith no particular justification but maximum efforts by the Interior Ministry, it is probably not surprising that even media outside Ukraine have linked the murder of a Ukrainian judge with the anti-government EuroMaidan protests

A legal aid contact post has been opened in Ukrainsky Dim [Ukraine House] on European Square in Kyiv. Its aim is to provide assistance to EuroMaidan activists, in particular those whose rights have been violated by the authorities, including the police

At least one of the judges (Oksana Tsarevych) now stripping journalists and AutoMaidan activists of their licenses on the basis of falsified documentation has previously been involved in the politically motivated trials of Tymoshenko and Lutsenko

According to the version proposed by the president’s representative in parliament, EuroMaidan protesters must first vacate government buildings, roads etc, and only then will people in detention over the protests be released. If they don’t vacate them within 15 days, the deal is off.

While excellent that Yaroslav Prytulenko and Volodymyr Kadura have been freed, Dzyndzya and Smaliy remain in custody, and the number of Hrushevsky St Prisoners is increasing. Those cases are no less dubious

Three EuroMaidan activists – musician and film festival organizer Dmytro Moskalets, poet Yukhim Dyshkant and economic researcher Artur Kovalchuk have been remanded in custody for 2 months in court hearings bearing an ominous resemblance to those concerning the Bankova Prisoners

Serhiy Vlasenko, who was controversially stripped of his parliamentary mandate in March 2013, and Yulia Tymoshenko’s defence counsel, is facing another criminal charge, at least as incomprehensible and worrying as the others.

A Kyiv court has convicted three men of plotting to blow up a Lenin monument which had already been removed. Reports suggest that Berkut riot police have used a gratuitous level of force against all protesters and journalists outside the court, with many injured

By leaving AutoMaidan activist Volodymyr Kadura in detention, another Kyiv court has refused to apply the amnesty law passed by a constitutional majority and in force since Dec 25.

Mykola Khavronyuk, a prominent criminal law specialist and research director for the Centre for Political and Legal Reform agrees that the amnesty bill is unimpressive as a legal document, but says that its aim is clear and can be enforced

The verdict is awaited in the trial of three men charged, most bizarrely, with “terrorism” over an alleged plot to blow up a Lenin statue. Problems in understanding how blowing up a statue can be terrorism are exacerbated by one further detail: there was no monument

A day after Viktor Yanukovych signed a supposed amnesty bill, there is no evidence that it will stop the prosecutions of protesters, while the ruling Party of the Regions is claiming that the law applies equally to police officers guilty of actions against demonstrators.