Fresh charges

In the current political climate, with fresh charges being piled up against Tymoshenko for alleged past misdeeds, no one is expecting a court ruling that will free her.

Evgenia Tymoshenko (R), daughter of jailed opposition leader and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, talks to her mother's lawyer Sergei Vlasenko during a break in the hearing on the case of her mother at the European Human Rights Court in Strasbourg, August 28, 2012.[Agencies]

In a separate trial, which has been adjourned several times because of back trouble that has confined Tymoshenko to a state-run hospital, she is accused of embezzlement and tax evasion going back to alleged offences when she was in business in the 1990s.

Analysts say the court's judges, in a judgment which is likely to take several hours to read, may simply reject her appeal on Wednesday.

Some say the judges may support in part some of the arguments of her defence counsel, but stop well short of a ruling that would free her.

"I think the court will partially satisfy the demands of Tymoshenko's lawyers. This could be taken as a correction of certain previous mistakes, but, of course, no one will release Tymoshenko from jail," said Mykhailo Pogrebynsky of the Kiev Centre for political research.

Lawyers for Tymoshenko pressed her case at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on Tuesday, arguing that her pre-trial detention had been unlawful and that she had been subjected to degrading treatment in prison.

"The only reason for her detention was to exclude her from Ukrainian political life and to prevent her running in the parliamentary elections," her defence counsel, Serhiy Vlasenko, told judges.

Tymoshenko's lawyers said she had been held in inhumane conditions -- in permanently lit, unheated cells and tracked by surveillance cameras.

The former prime minister, known for her trademark braided hair, was a leader of the 2004 Orange Revolution protests against sleaze and cronyism in Ukraine that derailed Yanukovich's first bid for the presidency.

She served two terms as prime minister under President Viktor Yushchenko, but the two fell out and their partnership dissolved into bickering and infighting.

She went on to lose narrowly to Yanukovich in a run-off for the presidency in February 2010 after a bitter campaign in which the sharp-tongued Tymoshenko heaped abuse on her opponent.