Eugenia Tymoshenko described her mother’s imprisonment as ‘brutal’, claiming that the former Prime Minister is watched and filmed 24 hours a day, even in her prison hospital.

Suspended membership

Eugenia’s lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson QC of Doughty Street Chambers, said that a decision in her favour by the European Court would force Ukraine to release her mother, or else Ukraine risked suspension from membership of the Council of Europe.
Yulia Tymoshenko was handed a seven-year term, having been convicted of ‘abuse of office’ over the brokering of a gas deal with the Russians – a charge seen as politically motivated by many in Europe.
Eugenia said that the objective of the current Yanukovich regime had been to rig the elections and deny Ukrainian voters their right to vote in order to achieve a majority in Parliament so that he could change the constitution and have Parliament (where his party would have a majority) choose the President rather than the public.

Judicial independence

Mr Robertson added that Yulia had committed no offence of a kind penalised in any other European country and which had involved no wrongdoing and no allegation of corruption or dishonesty. He also claimed that Ukraine had a Stalinist system and lacked judicial independence, proved by an ‘incredible’ 99.8 per cent conviction rate.