The regulation on the procedure for granting pardons has been updated

President V. Yanukovych issued a Decree on 16 September 2010 approving an updated version of the Regulation on the Procedure for Granting Pardons. Most of the norms of the Regulation remained unchanged. However, there are certain innovations.
In the past Regulation, the circle of subjects who could submit a petition for a pardon was defined, namely: in addition to the convicted person themselves, also “their defence attorney, parents, wife (husband), children, legal representative, public organisations, etc.”
In the new version of the Regulation, this list of subjects is absent. This could mean that from now on, all these subjects are deprived of the right to submit a petition for a pardon. This is confirmed by the wording of Clause 4 of the new Regulation, which states: “A petition for a pardon may be submitted...”. Obviously, such wording does not specify by whom exactly it may be submitted. It must be understood that the answer is contained in Clause 3 of the Regulation, where it is stated: “A person who has been convicted has the right to petition for a pardon...”.
Another innovation is the changes in the frequency of submitting petitions. If in the old version of the Regulation, Clause 5 provided that “in the event of the rejection of a petition for a pardon, a repeated petition regarding a person convicted of a particularly grave crime... may be submitted no earlier than one year later, and regarding a person convicted of other crimes, no earlier than six months from the time of the rejection of the previous petition.”
The updated Regulation now provides (with the exception of those sentenced to life imprisonment) for only one option regardless of the crime committed—all convicted persons can repeatedly petition for a pardon no earlier than one year later.

It can be considered that these innovations exhaust the noticeable changes made to the Regulation on the Procedure for Granting Pardons.

Katya Kot