MOSCOW, October 15 (RIA Novosti) – Ukraine’s president has no legal cause for pardoning jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, the country’s justice minister said Tuesday.
“Currently, the president has no legal grounds for signing a decree pardoning Tymoshenko,” Justice Minister Olena Lukash said, adding that it was her personal opinion.
She said that the presidential pardons commission had previously concluded it would be premature to pardon the former prime minister, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on abuse of power charges in 2011 over a 2009 gas agreement signed with Russia. Tymoshenko insists the charges were politically motivated, and the EU has called on Ukraine to pardon her.
In the spring of 2012, Kiev and Brussels inked an association agreement but the official signing of the document was postponed over the prosecution of Tymoshenko. Stefan Fule, European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy, said recently that the EU was waiting for a decision on the Tymoshenko case before the association agreement could be signed.
Tymoshenko’s lawyer Serhiy Vlasenko said on Oct. 4 that former European Parliament President Pat Cox and former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski had submitted a written request to President Viktor Yanukovych to pardon the former prime minister in order to enable her to travel abroad for medical treatment.
The former prime minister, who has also been accused of organizing the murder of a local politician in 1996, was transferred from prison to a Kharkiv hospital in eastern Ukraine last year after reporting serious back pains.
Her daughter Yevhenia earlier in the year cited German doctors as saying that her mother could become disabled unless she urgently underwent an operation for her back problems at a Berlin clinic.
