December 30, 2020

Russian monitoring of convicts' rights becomes a nonentity

topic:	Human Rights
located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

There's no truly independent public control over the penitentiary system in Russia, a human rights non-commercial organization, Gulagu.net, said.

The activists stressed that the existing public monitoring commissions gradually evolved into PR services of the prisons they were supposed to control. Adding that these commissions comprise former law enforcement officers but not human rights workers. This has, in turn, led to the sharply decreasing trust between the inmates and their rights' "defenders".

The commissions became fully dependent on regional administrations and local penitentiary services (FSIN), Gulagu.net said in an open address to the authorities. The authors of the letter noted that the human rights activists who really cared about the conditions in the prisons and labour camps were removed from the commissions and replaced with former policemen and officials. Those commissions regularly publish photo reports about how pleasant life in the corrections facilities is (the reports are filled with the images of the inmates planting flowers or rehearsing theater plays).

The state keeps issuing grants for such commissions which leads to widespread corruption during the tenders, the coordinator of the Gulagu.net Tatyana Yanchenko notes.

"Presidential and governmental grants aim at supporting the NCOs allegedly working with the penitentiary system. The federal budget allocates hundreds of millions of rubles annually but the money ends up in the pockets of those who write better grant applications, not those who actually understand the needs of the convicts. The convicts don't even know that they became a source of income for their 'defenders'," she says.

Beside the members of those "public commissions", every regional FSIN's director has a human rights aide on the payroll. "They are notoriously inefficient. Those positions should be scrapped and the FSIN directors must meet the human rights activists and relatives of the convicts in person, not through the aides' mediation," retired police colonel Spartak Kruglov proposes.

The Gulagu.net says that sometimes the inmates are coerced to tell the commissioners stories that have nothing to do with the truth. In other instances, the inmates dared telling the commissioners about their real situation to attract attention to the lawlessness in the prisons. Those stories often resulted not in mending the situations but the opposite – the prison administrations cruelly disciplined whistleblowers.

The activists urged authorities to disband those useless commissions and create a blacklist of the officials who gave the green light (and money) for their "work". According to the head of the independent Committee against tortures and corruption, Vladimir Osechkin, the state spent over 7 bln rubles ($87 million) for the human rights offices and organisations which defend the convicts' rights only nominally. Russia also pays millions of dollars annually to the convicts who complained to the ECHR.

"Out of more than one thousand of their workes, only a few actually try to uncover human rights violations in prisons. No criminal case has been opened based on those commissioners reports," Osechkin says.

Image by David Mark 

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