Courts lack over UAH 130 million for glass enclosures
The Ukrainian courts will not be able to replace the metal cages with the plexiglass constructions in the courtrooms, as required by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
This was stated by deputy head of the State Judicial Administration of Ukraine Pavlo Kondyk, the Human Rights Information Centre correspondent reports.
“We have the problem with funding. As of June 1, 2015, 143 metal enclosures were replaced with the plexiglass enclosures in the courtrooms to hear the criminal cases in the local courts and the courts of appeal. Unfortunately, this is only 8.7% of the total need as we have 1,651 such courtrooms,” Pavlo Kondyk said.
According to him, the installation of one plexiglass construction costs UAH 80,000.
“We need a total of UAH 132 million 80 thousand hryvnias. We requested to stipulate these funds in the budget for 2016. However, the Finance Ministry allocates only 7 million 950 thousand hryvnias for these purposes,” the representative of the Administration said.
As a reminder, the ECHR considers that holding of suspects behind the metal bars in the courtroom violates Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Court believes that this practice humiliates human dignity and recommends replacing the metal structures with plexiglass enclosures.
