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Court refuses to ease detention conditions for Timoshenko

A Kharkov district court on Tuesday turned down Ukrainian former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko’s appeal to ease conditions of her confinement

A poster featuring Yulia Timoshenko seen in downtown Kiev (archive) ITAR-TASS/Stanislav Krasilnikov

A poster featuring Yulia Timoshenko seen in downtown Kiev (archive)

© ITAR-TASS/Stanislav Krasilnikov

KHARKOV, February 11. /ITAR-TASS/. A Kharkov district court on Tuesday turned down Ukrainian former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko’s appeal to ease conditions of her confinement. The court decision was read out by Judge Antonina Yuryeva. The court ruling may be challenged in the court of appeals within seven days.

In January, a special commission of the Kachanovskaya penitentiary refused to transfer Timoshenko to the social rehabilitation section. The former prime minister, who is serving a seven-year prison term for acting in excess of her office duties while signing gas contracts with Russia in 2009, asked for easier detention terms on grounds of having served a third of her sentence. According to her lawyers, Ukraine’s Code of Criminal Procedure provides for such options of easier detention conditions are unlimited number of short-term visits, transfer to a social medical establishment and a possibility to leave the prison within the populated locality it is situated.

Earlier on Tuesday, chief of the Kachanovskaya penitentiary Igor Kolpashchikov said that the Ukrainian law had no provisions that could change conditions of Yulia Timoshenko’s stay at the Kharkov-based hospital, where she was undergoing a medical treatment course. In his words, medical treatment of convicts at city medical establishments was regulated by the ministry of health and the state penitentiary service.

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