The Ukrainian government is holding intensive talks with the European Union (EU) over the release of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Itar-Tass reported quoting Ukrainian media.
According to local media, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime minister Serhiy Arbuzov gave an interview for the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which he said that the authorities in Kiev are negotiating the possible treatment of Tymoshenko in Germany with European Parliament’ (EP) special envoys Pat Cox and Aleksander Kwaśniewski.
Cox and Kwaśniewski lead EP’s monitoring mission in Ukraine tasked to monitor the criminal cases against former Ukrainian PM Yulia Tymoshenko, Yuri Lutsenko and Valeriy Ivaschenko. At the parliamentary session in Strasbourg in April, the Cox-Kwasniewski mission to Ukraine was extended. Its next report will be scheduled at the end of September.
In the interview for the German media, Arbuzov also said that currently there exist no legal preconditions for the treatment of prisoners abroad and for this reason introduction of a bill in Parliament to “fix the problem within the framework of the law” was necessary.
Yulia Tymoshenko was jailed for seven years in 2011 on charges of overstepping her authority while prime minister by agreeing a gas deal with Russia. Her top ally, former Ukrainian interior minister Yuri Lutsenko, walked free in early April after Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, signed a decree pardoning him and another former governmental official.
Even though many saw Lutsenko’s pardon as a breakthrough in the case of ex-prime minister, President Yanukovych refused to pardon Tymoshenko, saying that the procedure was impossible as long as her trials were under way.
The Tymoshenko saga tangled up with the claims of the former PM of ill-treatment while in prison and with the hunger strikes she initiated last year. In April this year, the European Court of Human Rights found that the pre-trial detention of imprisoned former Ukrainian Prime Minister has been arbitrary, its lawfulness had not been properly reviewed and that she had no possibility to seek compensation for her unlawful deprivation of liberty.
However, the European court held by majority that there had been no violation of Article 3 of the Convention (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment) in respect of Tymoshenko’s alleged ill-treatment during her transfer to hospital in Kharkiv on 20 April 2012 and the effectiveness of the investigation of those complaints.