MOSCOW, (PNA/RIA Novosti) –Ukraine’s presidential commission on pardons has found no legal grounds to consider a pardon for jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, a commission member said.
“There can be legal grounds for the pardon only when somebody personally comes up with such request,” Larisa Skorik said in an interview with Ukraine’s Svoboda radio station.
Tymoshenko’s lawyer Serhiy Vlasenko said on Friday that former European Parliament President Pat Cox and former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski submitted a written request to Yanukovych for him to pardon the former prime minister in order for her to legally travel abroad.
The former premier, who was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of power abuse in 2011, said on Friday she agreed to undergo medical treatment in Germany as it was proposed this week by Cox and Kwasniewski.
Tymoshenko, who has also been accused of murdering a local politician in 1996, was transferred from prison to a Kharkiv hospital in eastern Ukraine last year after reporting serious back pains.
Her daughter, Yevgenia, earlier in the year cited German doctors as saying that her mother could become disabled unless she urgently underwent an operation for her back problems at a Berlin clinic.