(en) Alexander Rusyn I A regular, 17th in a row court hearing in Court of Appeal in Uzhgorod on September 30, 2011, with regard to the case number 499, "Ukraine v.s. the spiritual leader of the Ruthenians D. Sydor," was postponed due to non-attendance of the forensic linguistic examination experts for the fifth consecutive time. The court decided to oyer testimony of the expert of forensic linguistic examination using the IP-telephony (namely, "Skype").

All legalists are aware that the facts of legal significance could be obtained through testimony of the parties, third parties, their representatives questioned as witnesses, the testimony of witnesses, written (real) evidence, expert opinions, on condition that the said evidence was obtained without violation of the procedure established by law. At the trial, not all the facts of legal significance could be regarded as evidence, but only those that are directly defined in the law. Certain pre-statutory restriction in the use of evidence in resolving specific disputes in the law practice has traditionally been understood as the credibility of evidence. In this regard, there follows logical question: "Is there any mention in the law of obtaining evidence through the network, using the IP-telephony?

Certainly, the court might decide to hear as a witness in the case under consideration, say, a domestic parrot of the defendant, recording his testimony on a famous old portable double-cassette tape recorder WEF-Spidola-232. However, would it provide any legal significance and, accordingly, credibility for the objective trial? It is known that the reliability of the testimony by "Skype" is highly questionable, at least because of the technical possibility of eavesdropping by third parties, and even changing the content of conversation using some tricks. See, for example,

http://www.xakep.ru/post/30939/default.asp ;

http://www.xakep.ru/post/30907/default.asp

Consequently, providing the procedure of questioning a witness through "Skype", the court must additionally consider issues of reliability and sufficiency of the evidence obtained for the simple reason that the evidence obtained in violation of the law would not have legal force, and could not be considered as basis for the court decision.

The results of evaluation of evidence by the court must be reflected in the decision, which contains the reasons for which some evidence would be taken as a means to substantiate the findings of the court, while other evidence rejected, as well as the grounds to prefer one evidence over the other.

And, actually, what all this fuss is about? Each expert involved as a party to the proceedings is required to appear when summoned by the court for PERSONAL participation in the hearing, and answer questions related to the carried out research and their conclusions.

The court hearings were postponed for four consecutive sessions due to notorious refusal by the experts of forensic linguistic examination to appear in court to testify. The prosecution undertaken a number of tricks, such as replacing experts by a representative, holding a purely administrative position in the Office of examinations, or letters from experts indicating supposedly valid reasons why they can not attend the court hearing and formal replies with totally unconvincing excuses. And this whole circus is taking place (for a six months now), while it would be sufficient for the court to make a decision of reconduction of the witnesses to the court hearing…