A draft law has been registered in parliament which binds communications operators and providers to buy special equipment which law enforcement bodies will use for wiretapping

Ukrainians remain unprotected legislatively from wiretapping and intrusion in their private life with wiretapping, interception of emails, surveillance, etc used quite frequently

The Verkhovna Rada has at long last adopted as a base a draft law on improving mechanisms for protecting constitutional rights during investigative operations and counter-espionage activities

It is not merely the number of permits issued to intercept information which causes concern, but the feeble correlation between such invasion of privacy and prosecution for actual crimes.

The time frame during which the Cabinet of Ministers was supposed to inform the Administrative Court of Appeal on the measures taken for safeguarding rights and freedoms when carrying out investigative operations is about to expire

A Kyiv court has refused to declare a Cabinet of Ministers Resolution on court warrants for interception of communications unlawful, but has issued a separate judgment warning the Cabinet that the Resolution fails to safeguard vital rights

When carrying out investigative operations, detective inquiry and pre-trial investigations, court orders must be obtained not only for intercepting and recording telephone conversations, but also for receiving information about telephone conversations and their duration

No, it wasn’t lawful before, and there remain no real guarantees for you and I, but for those investigative operations officers who may not know that a mobile telephone is a telephone, all will be put right

The Pechersky District Court in Kyiv has found unlawful the criminal investigation launched against former deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Andriy Kozhemyakin who was accused of unlawful wiretapping of correspondent from the newspaper “Sevodnya” [“Today”) Oleksandr Korchynsky.

Human rights groups call for legislative amendments to protect the privacy of all citizens, and not money-wasting and futile efforts to protect an elite of civil servants and officials

During the past six months scandals have arisen systematically in Ukraine concerning the collection of information from communication channels of the well-known citizens. We want to remind that the collection of information from communication channels as one of methods of the ODA may be applied only in the cases concerned with grave and especially grave crimes.

The Supreme Rada Committee in charge of the legislative provision of law-enforcement activities recommended to take as a basis the draft of the law about the introduction of changes into Article 8 of the Law of Ukraine “On the ODA”, which would change the existing procedure of issuing the permissions to law-enforcing organs for wiretapping and search.

(Report at the public hearings of the draft of the Law of Ukraine “On the monitoring of telecommunications”, Kyiv, 26 November 2003)