Saturday, May 2, 2020

Only One in Every 44 Complaints of Torture by Russian Jailors Leads to Charges, Mukhamedzhanov Says


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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