SIMFEROPOL, April 19 /TASS/. Crimean Prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya has described as funny the start of criminal proceedings in Ukraine in connection with a ban imposed on the activities of the Mejilis of Crimean Tatar people in Crimea.
"I cannot help laughing at their actions. They should not delude people and create a semblance of work," Poklonskaya told TASS commenting a statement issued by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office.
Poklonskaya who had worked at Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office before 2014 explained that the initiation of criminal proceedings meant that the materials of the case had been included in a special register. But Ukraine’s Penal Code does not have an article under which the prosecutors could open a criminal case in connection with the ban of the Mejilis activities in Crimea.
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"It proves that they have included the materials they do not like in the single register of pre-trial investigations. But it does not mean that it is a crime. I can only guess that they included such an article in the Penal Code the previous night. I have not asked. It is common practice for them to change the Penal Code to a concrete case; create necessary articles and later remove them," the Crimean prosecutor said.
The Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office said it had initiated criminal proceedings after the Russian Justice Ministry had stopped the activities of the Mejilis of the Crimean Tatar people in view of their extremist nature.
The Russian Justice Ministry has included the Mejilis of the Crimean Tatar people in a list of organizations whose activities have been suspended because of their extremist nature, the Russian Justice Ministry reported on its website a day earlier on Monday.
"On April 18, 2016, the Mejilis of the Crimean Tatar people public association was added to a list of public and religious organizations whose activities have been suspended in view of their extremist nature," the report said.
As it became known last week, the collegium of Crimea’s Supreme Court will get down to studying documents proving the extremist activities of the Mejilis of the Crimean Tatar people on April 25. On February 15, 2016, Crimean Prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya filed a lawsuit urging the court to recognize the activities of the Mejilis of the Crimean Tatar people as extremist.
On April 13, Crimea’s Prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya passed a decision to stop the Mejilis activities in compliance with articles 9 and 10 of the federal law "On Counteracting Extremist Activities".
The materials of the case contain more than 600 pages of evidence proving the Mejilis’ destructive activities, including court decisions on the actions of Mejilis individual members; the founding documents; references on the work in Crimea of various public organizations dealing with Crimean Tatar problems issued by state power bodies.
The court will also have to consider the evidence presented by Crimean Prosecutor Natalya Poklonskaya that the Mejilis of the Crimean Tatar people organized unauthorized rallies, including mass riots and unrest outside the republic’s parliament building on February 26, 2014. Calls by the organization’s head Refat Chubarov to intrude in the Crimea and criminal proceedings initiated by the Federal Security Service in connection with a subversive act in the territory of Ukraine in November 2015 when Ukrainian radicals blew up the pillars of power transmission lines supplying electricity to Crimea could provide additional evidence on the Mejilis extremist activities.