KYIV. Nov 11 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Leading European attorney-at-law Bertrand Malmendier joins the team of legal defense of head of the political council of the Opposition Platform - For Life party Viktor Medvedchuk, one of his attorneys Larysa Cherednychenko has said.

"So that the authorities do not accuse us of bias and the fact that we are in vain to slander her, such a good one, that is why Mr. Bertrand joined us. Europe, where we are all striving. And we will be glad if Mr. Bertrand will help us with subsequent appeals to the European Court of Human Rights in the interests of Viktor Volodymyrovych," Cherednychenko said at a press conference held at Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday.

She said the defense had previously filed two appeals to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) due to non-compliance with the law and legal procedures, which "causes total falsification of the criminal case."

"We have an answer: criminal proceedings have been initiated on one of the appeals, the case is entitled 'Medvedchuk v. Ukraine."

In addition, the attorney said that as of today, Medvedchuk was served with charges in two criminal proceedings, it is about the "gas case in Crimea" (2014-2020) and the "coal case" (2014-2015). According to her, protection, having gained access to the materials of the pretrial investigation, can observe that law enforcement agencies operate outside the legal area.

Doctor of Law Bertrand Malmendier works in Berlin and has been in Germany since 1997. For his part, he said that on November 10 he signed an agreement on the provision of legal aid to Medvedchuk, and also joined the team of his lawyers.

"We will study how expedient the criminal proceedings launched against Mr. Medvedchuk are. We will also cooperate with public organizations and represent Mr. Medvedchuk at the European stage, in particular, in the European Court of Human Rights [...]. We also cooperate with colleagues from the UK and the United States in order to study this case in more detail. Our goal is to study the situation more deeply in order to understand whether there is actually a violation of rights in Ukraine," he said.