AMSTERDAM (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 12th March, 2020) Since the Dutch court is not obligated to translate all the materials related to the MH17 crash case � with the case file consisting of 36,000 pages � the Russian defendant may be left without the possibility to study all the documents, a representative of a district court in the Hague told Sputnik on Thursday.
"If the defendants are present in the court room and cannot understand Dutch or English, the judge will provide a certified interpreter. Translation of the file case can be provided by the lawyer of the defendants, but not by the court. The court is in Dutch, so all files and hearings will be in Dutch. No translation other than an interpretor is obligatory," the representative said.
"Judging by my experience, related to availability and busyness of qualified staff, it will take one and a half years at least to translate all these documents," Elena Tais, the head of the Netherlands-based Russian translation agency RLTS, told Sputnik, adding that the case file consisted of 36,000 pages.
The hearings began at the Schiphol Judicial Complex on Monday and Tuesday, and will continue on March 23. Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, and Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko are the defendants. Pulatov is represented by an international group, uniting two Dutch lawyers and one Russian lawyer, while the others are tried in absentia.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 crashed on July 17, 2014, in eastern Ukraine while en route to Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam. All 298 people on board died. Kiev and the self-proclaimed republics in Ukraine's easternmost region have exchanged blame for the downing of the plane. The accident is being investigated by Dutch prosecutors and the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT). They have claimed that the plain was hit by a Buk missile that belonged to the Russian armed forces.
Moscow has repeatedly denied involvement in the incident and has called the JIT investigation biased, as Russia's evidence has been ignored by investigators.
