"Lost" Property—The Owner Is to Blame: How the System Justifies Police Arbitrariness

In our case, a telling situation arose: during a search, the authorities seized all of our client’s equipment based on extremely specific and sensitive suspicions. Subsequently, an expert examination confirmed the client’s complete innocence, and the case was closed; however, the equipment was not returned because the police simply… lost it. And now for the most interesting part—the system’s response to the claim for damages.

The technician has been missing for over four and a half years. For the lost digital space, the destroyed personal data, and the prolonged stress, the court assessed the non-pecuniary damages at 5,000 UAH—that’s about 3 UAH for each day of unlawful deprivation of property. However, the court completely denied the claim for over 200,000 UAH in material damages.

The court’s argument boils down to mere formalism: the market value of the devices, taking depreciation into account, has not been proven. In other words, a person would somehow have to conduct an expert assessment of the depreciation of property that physically disappeared through the fault of the law enforcement officers themselves. Demanding an assessment of what the state “lost” in its own offices is legal nonsense.

But that’s not all. By awarding a laughable 3 hryvnias per day for the violation of constitutional rights, the court completely ignored economic reality. While the confiscated equipment sat gathering dust somewhere for years and we were proving our client’s innocence, inflation simply eroded the purchasing power of that money.

The purchasing power of the hryvnia four years ago and today are two completely different figures. The court did not merely award a purely symbolic sum—not even enough to buy a cup of coffee today—it effectively reduced the state’s liability to zero. Paying out devalued kopecks after years of legal wrangling for property that law enforcement officers themselves destroyed—that is not justice; it is a blatant mockery of the institution of property protection.

And what about the police themselves? Law enforcement officials categorically deny any wrongdoing. Their position in court is based on a trivial legal technicality: the ruling to lift the arrest allegedly did not explicitly include the instruction to “order the return.”

At the same time, the pretrial investigation authority is deliberately ignoring the explicit mandatory provision of Article 174 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine. According to the procedural law, the lifting of the seizure of property constitutes an unconditional basis for its immediate return to the owner. The investigating judge’s ruling to lift the seizure deprives the state of any legal title to retain the property; therefore, the legislature does not require the separate word “return” to be included, since the lifting of the seizure in and of itself restores possession of the property.

The police’s attempt to hide behind the absence of a single word—“oblige”—in a procedural document is not a defense of the law, but a manipulative attempt to shift the blame for their own negligence and the loss of another person’s property.

Our legal position is based on the established case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The judgment in the case of “East/West Alliance Limited v. Ukraine” (Application No. 19336/04, dated January 23, 2014) clearly states that the state bears responsibility for the preservation of property. The essence of this case law lies not in the existence of receipts, but in the fact that if it is impossible to accurately calculate the damages due to the state’s loss of property, the court does not have the right to blindly and formally dismiss the claim. The court is obligated to conduct a general assessment of the damages, guided by the principles of reasonableness, proportionality, and fairness.

That’s the kind of justice where formalism trumps common sense, and a piece of paper is valued more highly than an actual violation of constitutional rights. The government loses your belongings, the police hide behind the absence of a single word in a court order for years, and then the court refuses to pay for any of it because you can’t prove how much wear and tear your belongings sustained while they were stored in an unknown location.

No one is immune to this. The main problem with the system is its lack of accountability. We cannot accept this approach, so an appeal has already been filed, and we will definitely prevail in this case.

Those who wish to assess for themselves all the nuances of this “philosophy of justice” can read the full text of the decision at this link:

https://reyestr.court.gov.ua/Review/132790441

Read the original source—we certainly don't intend to stick with this line of reasoning in the appeal.