Mikalai Ulasevich gets no compensation of court expenditures

On 12 March the civil cases board of the Hrodna Regional Court considered two private appeals against the rulings of the Ashmiany District Court concerning Mikalai Ulasevich’s case. One of them was filed by Mr. Ulasevich, the other – by his representative, member of the Belarusian Helsinki Committee Hary Pahaniaila. The first appeal concerned the refusal of the Ashmiany District Court to issue an additional ruling concerning the court expenditures.

The matter is that the Ashmiany District Court granted the lawsuit of a local entrepreneur, the head of a building firm Andrei Dziatko, to civil activist Mikalai Ulasevich only partially. According to the ruling, the defendant was to pay 1 million rubles to the plaintiff, and the court expenditures were to be paid by the both sides.

The reason for this trial was that in April 2011 Mr. Ulasevich had applied to the General Procuracy and the Presidential Security Council in connection with office abuses by the head of the Astravets District Executive Committee Adam Kavalko. As a result, one of the figurants of the appeal, Andrei Dziatko, whom Ulasevich accused of repeatedly receiving unlawful preferences from Mr. Kavalko, filed a lawsuit with the Ashmiany District Court, demanding to exact from Mr. Ulasevich 30 million rubles as a compensation for the moral harm.

The appeal filed by Hary Pahaniaila concerned the refusal of the Ashmiany District Court to accept his cassation appeal against the verdict on Mikola Ulasevich’s case (the court stated that the appeal couldn’t be accepted as Mr. Ulasevich allegedly hadn’t given his representative the power of attorney to appeal the court verdict).

The panel of judges of the Hrodna Regional Court turned down the appeals without giving any explanations to Mikalai Ulasevich. It doesn’t surprise the activist, as, to his mind, the initial trial was ordered by the authorities. What concerns the refusal to Mr. Pahaniaila, it is not the first such incident: in January the court also refused to accept a cassation appeal filed by another representative of Mikalai Ulasevich, Natallia Matskevich. The official reason was that the state fee for filing the appeal wasn’t paid. However, according to Mr. Ulasevich, the fee was paid timely. “That’s why I think that the refusal to accept cassation appeals from both of my representatives is a gross violation of the right which guaranteed by Article 62 of the Constitution of the Republic of Belarus. What concerns my private appeal, the refusal is a direct violation of Article 345 of the Civil Process Code,” commented Mr. Ulasevich.