Attorneys Dmytro Yagunov and Valentina Yurchenko Defended the Victim’s Rights in the Odesa Court of Appeals
On 11 August 2026, the Odesa Court of Appeal granted the appeal filed by attorneys Dmytro Yagunov and Valentyna Yurchenko on behalf of the victim, and quashed the ruling of the investigating judge of the Ovidiopol District Court of Odesa Region, who had refused to grant the complaint against the investigator’s decision to close the criminal proceedings concerning the violent death of a minor child — she was only 14 years old at the time of her death.
The Court of Appeal’s key focus was not so much on the substance of the investigation itself (although it too had been conducted for years with gross violations), but rather on how the court hearing of the victim’s complaint had been organized. The investigating judge had in effect held the hearing “in the dark”: neither the victim herself, nor — as it turned out — one of her two representatives had received proper notice of the date and time of the hearing; the summons to the other representative arrived in his electronic cabinet only after the hearing had already taken place. Moreover, the case file contained neither a hearing log nor minutes of the hearing, nor any technical recording of its course whatsoever — the court secretary confirmed that no record had been kept at all. This made it impossible to verify subsequently whether an adversarial hearing had taken place at all.
The case concerns the murder of a child by unidentified persons — an investigation that, from the moment of her death in April 2011 to this day, for more than fifteen years, has repeatedly been closed and reopened, despite the court’s direct instruction back in 2025 concerning more than twenty specific investigative actions that the investigation has still failed to carry out.
In advancing the victim’s position, the defense consistently relied on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights concerning the procedural aspect of Article 2 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms — in particular, the five-factor test of investigative effectiveness (adequacy, thoroughness, independence, promptness, and involvement of the deceased’s family) formulated in Mustafa Tunç and Fecire Tunç v. Turkey, as well as Enukidze and Girgvliani v. Georgia, Sergey Shevchenko v. Ukraine, Trubnikov v. Russia, Keenan v. the United Kingdom, Pretty v. the United Kingdom, Masneva v. Ukraine, Vasyunets v. Ukraine, Chumak v. Ukraine, Merkulova v. Ukraine, Kachurka v. Ukraine, Dudnyk v. Ukraine, Oleynikova v. Ukraine, Zubkova v. Ukraine, Pozhyvotko v. Ukraine, Kholodkov and Kholodkova v. Ukraine, Gongadze v. Ukraine, Lyubov Efimenko v. Ukraine, Mazepa and Others v. Russia, and Ryzhenko v. Ukraine.
The Court of Appeal’s decision is an important signal: a victim’s right to be heard in a case concerning the death of a loved one cannot be sacrificed to the procedural convenience of the investigation.
