What should a lawyer be prepared for when protecting a client in corruption cases?

Law enforcement agencies often only create the appearance of an objective investigation of a corruption crime. In this case, the evidence base is filled with "junk" data, which are difficult to understand.

The associate partner of Skliarenko, Sydorenko & Partners, Andriy Trigub spoke about the peculiarities of providing legal assistance to individuals suspected of committing corruption crimes during a seminar for lawyers, which was organized and held in Rivne by the National Association of Lawyers of Ukraine.

“It is noteworthy that a formal approach to organizing an investigation practically does not prevent the prosecution from getting permission to conduct covert investigative search actions,” he said. The lawyer cited a disappointing average for defense lawyers as the court met with 96% for covert Investigative Search Actions. By regions, the lowest rate of satisfaction of applications in the Kiev region (92%), the highest - in Ternopil (100%).

The expert called the deliberate restriction on access to the information that really matters to the defense party the other side of the “waste” of the prosecution’s work.

“In the context of protecting information obtained as a result of covert investigative (search) actions, the Criminal Procedure Code expressly prohibits making copies of protocols on conducting Covert Investigative Search Actions,” A. Trigub recalled. “However, investigators and prosecutors refer to this rule of Article 254 of the Code even at the stage of opening the materials of the case (Article 290), where the prosecution is obliged to provide access and the ability to copy any documents.”

Among the other mechanisms of artificial limitation of the capabilities of defense lawyers in criminal proceedings, the lawyer named the selectivity of secret recording of conversations and transferring information to the protocol, the inability to obtain complete records of events to prove a different context of the conversations that took place.

Moreover, the listed difficulties in criminal proceedings can sometimes become the starting points for building defense tactics. So, a typical gap in the work of the prosecution is the discrepancy of the transcripts of conversations in the protocols with the original records. According to the associate partner of Skliarenko, Sydorenko & Partners, another standard “illness” of law enforcement agencies is to attract the same applicants who have suffered from the atrocities of various officials. In fact, such provocateurs are often themselves under investigation, which indicates their dependence on law enforcement

About 400 lawyers from Rivne, Volyn, Vinnitsa, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhya, Kirovograd, Kiev, Khmelnitsky, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Poltava, Lugansk, Lviv, Chernihiv, Nikolaev, Zakarpatsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi regions took part in the seminar.