On the eve of Victory Day MAUP [the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management] lost its latest civil court case. On this occasion the Shevchenkivsky District Court in Kyiv rejected the institute’s claim against a group of Ukrainian intellectuals: Myroslav Popovych, Stanislav Kulchytsky, Yury Shapoval, Yaroslav Yatskiv, Oleksandr Maiboroda, Natalya Yakovenko, as well as the educational newspaper “Svit” [“World”].

MAUP had demanded 11 thousand UAH in moral damages from the authors of the Statement from the Ukrainian intelligentsia “Against xenophobia and for a European Ukraine”. It had demanded that the authors retract their assertion that “a smallish group of fringe figures, mostly connected with the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management and its associated bodies, under the guise of pseudo-patriotic rhetoric have tried to establish in the eyes of the world what would seem to be the long since debunked stereotype of Ukraine as a breeding ground for xenophobia” and other analogous statements.

Since MAUP has not recently found much joy in the courts, the Academy is constantly changing its court representatives. Previously in such cases it was represented by the MAUP Department for contract and legal work, the MAUP Department of legal defence and the law firm “Illyashev and Partners”. This time it hired the lawyer V. Zubchevsky, however, as we see, this still had no impact on the judicial examination.

The members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were represented by the lawyer Viacheslav Yabubenko who has around 10 cases already against MAUP to his name. Legal assistance was provided by the Strategic Litigations Fund of the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union with the support of the Open Society Institute [Budapest].

In Mr Yakubenko’s view, the latest court ruling is further confirmation that anti-Semitism is alien to the Ukrainian nation, that it is rejected both by society as a whole, and by the judiciary. The next step must be to improve the mechanism for prosecuting those who incite ethnic enmity.

UHHRU