Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 30 – Only one in
every 44 complaints by Russian prisoners that their jailors have mistreated
them leads to criminal charges, Bulat Mukhamedzhanov of the Zone of Law rights
group says. And in some regions, where there are hundreds of such complaints no
charges have been brought at all.
On the one hand, this reflects a
desire of the powers to protect jailors and to present a positive image of the penal
system to Russians and the world. And on the other, the activist continues, it is
a product of the fact that Russian law still does not make torture as such a
crime (ridl.io/ru/pytki-v-rossii-kto-vinovat-i-chto-delat/).
Last year, Russian courts found 641
officers of the force organs guilty of exceeding their authority by using force
or special means, under Article 286 of the Criminal Code. But even now, Mukhamedzhanov
says, there is no special paragraph about “’tortures’” in that code, making it
more difficult for prisoners and others to demand that charges be brought.
The Russian government reports that
the number of cases of official mistreatment of prisoners that might be
classified as torture by others has been continually falling over the last
decade, but “hardly anyone with good sense that there has been a real decline
in the number of people mistreated in prisons and colonies,” the activist
continues.
That is at least in part because “over
the last ten years, we have become witnesses to dozens of scandals involving
torture committed by siloviki officers” in the media. After each of them, the
authorities promise to clean up the situation, but that is the limit of their
actions. Nothing fundamentally changes.
The same thing is true in the Russian
military where conditions involving mistreatment of recruits and private soldiers
have grown worse since Sergey Shoygu became defense minister (zona.media/article/2017/03/04/soldiers)
and especially since Vladimir Putin threw the cloak of secrecy over all such
cases (rbc.ru/politics/28/05/2015/5566d8889a79477ecebe00e8).
Similar
trends are in evidence in the penal system, where the authorities have largely
succeeded in excluding from prisons and camps any representatives of observer
commissions who earlier were able to report the abuses that prisoners reported
to them. That system has now been “buried,” Mukhamedzhanov says.
Even
senior Russian officials, like the Procurator General of the Russian Federation,
acknowledge that “the insufficient openness of the penal system” opens the door
to all kinds of abuse including the mistreatment and even torture of prisoners
(theins.ru/obshestvo/182995). And Russians know on their own skin
that torture is always an option with the police.
According
to a Levada Center poll, one Russian in ten has experienced torture at the hands
of the authorities at one point or another, a disturbing figure that suggests
the number of cases of torture is far larger than the authorities admit and not
declining as they claim (levada.ru/2019/06/27/pytki-v-rossii-rasprostranennost-yavleniya-i-otnoshenie-obshhestva-k-probleme-3/).
But the powers that be, Mukhamedzhanov
says, “over the course of many years have refused to acknowledge the problem of
torture in the country” and have rejected criticism from rights activists, the
United Nations, and the European Committee for Preventing Torture or Inhuman
and Denigrating Actions or Punishments.
Three things are necessary to begin
to cure the Russian system of torture: ensuring civilian control of the
siloviki so that officers do not assume they will always be protected, defining
torture as a crime under Russian law, and guaranteeing public access to
prisoners and soldiers so that no torturer will escape punishment.
“The adoption of all these measures
could become the first serious step on the path to eliminating torture in
Russia,” Mukhamedzhanov says. “But up to now, the struggle of the Russian authorities
with this vicious phenomenon is taking place only on paper;” and Russians are
continuing to suffer as a result.
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