Apparently damning ‘evidence’ linking a murdered child with the young Roma man whose arrest for the killing led to appalling riots in the Odesa oblast may have been faked

Dmitry Dolgopolov and his common-law wife Anna Sukhonosova were accused of having gathered secret information for Ukraine’s Military Intelligence, and sentenced to 10 and 9 years, respectively

If post-Maidan hopes of a full overhaul of Ukraine’s judiciary always seemed dangerously optimistic, there was an expectation that judges who had taken part in persecuting Maidan activists would not be able to continue as though nothing had happened

Ukrainian political prisoner Volodymyr Balukh has been moved from a Crimean prison to Russia, with the gruelling journey to Russian Krasnodar likely to be dragged out for up to a month

A court in Russian-occupied Crimea has sentenced a man who killed his wife, dismembered her body and threw the parts in different rubbish bins to eight years’ imprisonment, 11 years less than a Crimean Tatar political prisoner imprisoned for his faith

Russia’s Justice Ministry has demanded that the de facto Crimean Bar Association expel Emil Kurbedinov, with this almost certainly leading to his being stripped of his licence. This is the latest of several attempts to silence Kurbedinov and other courageous lawyers in occupied Crimea

If the forensic medical expert is right, then the young man on trial for the murder of a child that led to shocking anti-Roma riots in the Odesa oblast could not have committed the crime

Sergei Tkach may have raped and killed over 100 young girls over 25 years, escaping capture because at least ten other men had been tortured into ‘confessing’ to individual crimes. Other Ukrainians are serving life sentences for other people’s crimes, with Ukraine’s legislators in no hurry to do anything about it.

In what is almost a first for Russian-occupied Crimea, one of the criminal charges against Crimean Tatar activist, Ismail Ramazanov has been dropped “for want of a crime”.

It is 12 years on 26 October since the fatal bomb blast in Lviv which killed 14-year-old Maria Kutsynda and resulted in Volodymyr Panasenko being sentenced to life imprisonment for a crime that nobody ever believed that he had committed. 

The presiding judge in the trial by absentia of fugitive ex-President Viktor Yanukovych gained notoriety during Euromaidan for knowingly unwarranted rulings against peaceful activists.  Most worryingly, this is probably no oversight, but a quite deliberate choice of judge.   

A court in Russian-occupied Crimea has upheld a shockingly high 8-year sentence on Hennady Lymeshko, a young father from the Kharkiv oblast and one of the ever-increasing number of Ukrainians whom Russia’s FSB forces to ‘confess’ on camera to supposed ‘sabotage plots’.

Lawyers representing the families of slain Euromaidan activists have warned that current and future investigations into crimes against Maidan activists are in jeopardy with the danger, most frustratingly, coming from Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko.

The ‘trial’ in Russian-occupied Crimea of two men arrested 18 months ago in the FSB’s second ‘Ukrainian saboteur’ plot has been delayed because of fatal contradictions between the indictment and evidence

Right now, not only the future of anticorruption and judicial reforms is at stake. All the country’s other successes depend on whether we get the anticorruption court right this time

The court hearing the high-profile trial of a young man accused of the rape and murder of a child has rejected an application to hold the trial behind closed doors. The trial is of public interest because of the anti-Roma pogrom which followed it, and because there are grounds for believing that the defendant is innocent.

An important European Court of Human Rights ruling has prompted Ukrainian human rights groups to demand a Constitutional Court review of the current lack of real mechanisms for releasing people sentenced to life imprisonment. The move is particularly important given strong grounds in very many cases for believing that life prisoners are either innocent or did not deserve the severe sentence imposed. . 

The regularity with which certain ‘judges’ appear in politically-motivated cases in Russian-occupied Crimea has long been the subject of scrutiny.  Lawyers and journalists have recently identified at least two ‘witnesses’ who seem to be migrating from one political trial to another, and there are multiple cases where the supposed ‘witnesses for the prosecution’ are either people whom the FSB brought with them, or people who signed unread documents under duress. 

Ukraine’s Supreme Court has begun reinstating judges who were dismissed for breach of oath in connection with their politically motivated rulings against Euromaidan activists.  The number of such judges to have ever faced these or other disciplinary measures was always low, and it now appears that all 19 of those dismissed will probably win their appeals.