Council of Europe to consider Ukraine's implementation of ECHR decision in Gongadze case
In December, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe is to consider Ukraine's implementation of the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of journalist Georgy Gongadze. On September 17, Pavlo Pushkar, head of the department for enforcement of ECHR decisions of the directorate general for human rights and the rule of law of the Council of Europe, said it in an online discussion on the safety of journalists, as Ukrinform reported.
"The next meeting of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in the Gongadze case is scheduled for December 2020 ... At the last hearing of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which took place in November 2019, it was noted that criminal proceedings have not been completed," Pushkar said.
He added that the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe also noted that the issue of responsibility of the perpetrators in the case of Gongadze's murder remained udecided.
One should note that Myroslava Gongadze, widow of journalist Georgy Gongadze, filed a lawsuit with the European Court of Human Rights in 2005 for an improper investigation by the Ukrainian state into the disappearance and murder of her husband.
Georgy Gongadze was an Ukrainian journalist and the founder of the Ukrainska Pravda online publication. He went missing on September 16, 2000.
In November of the same year, a headless corpse was found in a forest in the Kyiv region, which, according to the experts, might have belonged to the journalist. In 2009, the remains of a skull belonging to the missing journalist were found in the Kyiv region. However, Georgy Gongadze's mother did not believe until the last moment that the found remains belonged to her son, so he was buried only on March 22, 2016.
On January 29, 2013, the Pechersk District Court of Kyiv sentenced Oleksiy Pukach to life imprisonment for Gongadze's murder. Pukach's defense appealed against the court's decision.
On December 6, 2016, the Kyiv Court of Appeals upheld the sentence of life imprisonment for Oleksiy Pukach.
However, the point in this high-profile case has not yet been set : not only the perpetrators of the journalist's murder remain unpunished, but also unnamed.
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