Odesa officers detained a SoftServe Net developer and drew up a report on an administrative violation. However, the Bilyaevsky District Court found no offenses in the IT specialist’s actions.
7 km from the border
As stated in the case file, on March 3, border guards detained an IT specialist together with another Ukrainian citizen 7 km from the border. The detention was carried out by the head of the situation monitoring group of the Border Guard Inspectors Department.
The resident of Aitiv allegedly attempted to illegally cross the state border of Ukraine to Moldova outside the established checkpoint.
The case was sent to court. However, the developer did not appear at the court hearing, although he left a statement that he would be present at the hearing.
I came to test the equipment
As a result, the court decided to consider the case in the absence of the accused.
From the written explanation of the SoftServe IT employee, it appears that he intended to come to a certain address and conduct an analysis and consultation on the technical equipment in the house with possible further cooperation with the consent of both parties.
For this purpose, he called a taxi from Odesa to the village of Yasky. But on Tsentralna Street, he was detained and taken to the police station, where he was questioned by border guards and military personnel.
The border guards claimed that the programmer and his traveling companion could not confirm the purpose of their stay in the border area during the questioning.
Also, the case file contains a diagram of a possible violation of the state border in the area, which schematically depicts the place where the car was stopped.
However, the court did not find a specific fact of offenses in the actions of the IT employee.
«The legal basis for imposing an administrative penalty on a particular person is sufficient evidence of the offense for which the penalty is imposed. In accordance with the provisions of the Code of Administrative Offenses, a prerequisite for bringing a person to administrative responsibility is the existence of an event and an administrative offense… …No one is obliged to prove his or her innocence of a crime. The accusation cannot be based on evidence obtained illegally or on assumptions. All doubts as to the proof of a person’s guilt shall be interpreted in his or her favor», — it says in the case file.