The draft law № 9055 won’t make the litigation either faster or more qualitative — people's deputies

People's deputies from different fractions criticize the draft law № 9055 »On the Bar and Advocacy" and urge the colleagues not to support it.

This was stated by Yurii Miroshnychenko, Leonid Yemets and Denys Sylantiev on the air of the TV channel "Rada".

"On this Day of the Bar, we must state that there is a huge danger to the bar and the role of advocate as a whole. Therefore, I hope colleagues will consider this argument and make the only possible decision. This issue should be resolved in such a way as to pass a law on a bar, which does not contain any tools for depriving an advocate of the opportunity to protect a citizen of Ukraine," — said Leonid Yemets. First of all, among the dangers of the draft law he defined the opportunity to bring the advocate to liability for abuse of procedural rights, as well as violation of the right of a person to counsel of free choice.

"Advocates are accused of using the disadvantages of legislation, but instead of correcting the shortcomings of the legislation, the Criminal Code, they decided to give the judge the right to rule over an advocate and tell him or her how to protect or not protect a person. This is the work of the advocate — to find these loopholes and use them, and the work of the legislator - to change the laws so that they work, to close the "hole" in the legislation, so that it does not have double interpretations," — said Leonid Yemets.

Yurii Miroshnychenko emphasized that the proposed law will not make litigation either faster or more qualitative. "What is valuable for us — a speed of trial or its quality? Protecting human rights and freedoms or closing a case? The task of the litigation is to find out the truth, but not to go quickly all the stages of the process. If we weaken such a powerful institute, which is the bar all over the world, we will lose both speed and quality. If there are good intentions to accelerate the process, this should be solved in another way," — said Yurii Miroshnychenko.

He emphasized that advocates are already put in discriminatory conditions in the confrontation with law enforcement agencies under the current law. «There is a whole system of public investigation, thousands of people, opportunities, coercion behind the prosecutor's office. And, on the opposite side, there is an advocate who got the right to obtain evidence but did not receive the toolkit. In these circumstances, blaming the advocate for using the possibilities provided by the law to protect the client from us, parliamentarians, would not be honest,» — said Yurii Miroshnychenko. He stated that the Opposition bloc's fraction does not support the draft law № 9055. "Today it's time to protect the advocates because tomorrow there will be no one to protect us from the tyranny of the dishonest representatives of the legal system," — the People's Deputy said.

People's Deputy Denys Sylantiev stressed that the draft law was not developed professionally and was not agreed with the bar community. "We see results when the initiative involves only a few people who have not studied the problem thoroughly. Therefore, we are constantly hurrying, because there is no time to do something good, and then have time to redo it,"  — said the deputy of the Radical party.

The full video of the "PROParliament" program on the TV channel "Rada" of December 19 can be viewed here.