NABU accused of violating presumption of innocence in Solskyi case
Kyiv • UNN
The High Anti-Corruption Court received complaints from lawyers about violations of the presumption of innocence by the NABU and the SAPO in the Solskyi case.
The defense lawyers complained to the High Anti-Corruption Court about violation of the presumption of innocence by NABU and SAPO, which categorically claim that their clients committed a crime at the stage of pre-trial investigation, when such crimes have not yet been proven. The relevant data are contained in court materials, UNN reports.
The lawyers call the prosecutors biased, because they approved the suspicion of the NABU detectives, "the text of which contains a categorical statement that Person_3 committed specific criminal offenses, and not 'is suspected of committing them'".
UNN does not know which defendant in the case is in question. However, the NABU's reports in this case are indeed categorical. The detectives claim that "the former head of the Verkhovna Rada's Agrarian Committee and current minister was caught in the possession of state land," referring to Solsky. Although the latter does not own the land in question, because it was privatized by ATO soldiers who, in turn, are confident in their innocence.
According to the detectives, the ATO soldiers privatized the land that was used by the National Agrarian Academy. However, the NAAS itself says it has no official documents for the land and never had any. They believe that the land was theirs on the basis of an act of "lifetime use." This act was issued back in the Soviet Union, when the land belonged to collective farms, whose legal successors are allegedly the structures of the agricultural academy.
However, they cannot find this act either. So, the main intrigue of the whole Solsky case is whether NABU detectives will be able to prove that the land legally belonged to the National Academy of Sciences, and Solsky had a criminal intent to take this land from the National Academy of Sciences to give it to the ATO soldiers. So far, there is no such evidence.
Considering the defense's complaints, the HACC judge noted that "the principle of presumption of innocence prohibits public authorities from making any statements regarding the guilt of a person in committing a criminal offense until his or her guilt is proven and established by a court verdict that has entered into force.
"According to part one of Article 62 of the Constitution of Ukraine, only a guilty verdict is a court act that must establish a person's guilt in committing a criminal offense, so other acts of public authority cannot contain any position on the person's guilt, even in the form of assumptions about such guilt," the HACC judge reminded.
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In an interview with UNN, the director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, Yevhen Zakharov, called the NABU's statements against former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Solsky a violation of the presumption of innocence. In his opinion, the real reason for the prosecution of Solsky is the desire to stop his efforts to create a land market in Ukraine, not to punish him for his criminal actions. And such a substitution indicates the political motives of the criminal prosecution.
