Russia spent € 3.5 million to pay ECHR compensation for torture

Human rights activists have calculated that since 2015, the European Court of Human Rights has awarded Russian applicants € 3.5 million in cases of torture, inhuman and degrading conditions in places of detention. informs RBC.

Calculations were made by analysts of the project “To be precise” of the fund “Need help”. They counted the amount of compensation in the ECtHR judgments issued from 2015 to 2020. The judgments of the ECHR under Article 3 of the European Convention on Cases of Violations in Penitentiary Institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service were analyzed. The article, along with torture, prohibits “inhuman and degrading treatment”.

According to analysts, complaints came from 46 regions. Experts note that the absence of complaints does not mean that there are no problems in the region. The largest amounts of compensation were recovered in favor of the applicants, who were held in colonies and pre-trial detention centers in the Nizhniy Novgorod (€ 696.7 thousand) and Kostroma regions (€ 419.7 thousand). This is followed by St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region (€ 368 thousand), the Trans-Baikal Territory (€ 270.5 thousand). The Sverdlovsk Region closes the top five (€ 211.3 thousand).

The numbers are not related to the number of prisoners in the region – there are not many prisoners in the Nizhny Novgorod region (but there are many FSIN institutions), while in the Sverdlovsk region there are most of them in the country.

“There are three pre-trial detention centers in the Nizhniy Novgorod region, there are special premises in colonies operating in a pre-trial detention center – this is a very tough version of a pre-trial detention center, where everything is even worse than in a regular pre-trial detention center. The accused is often brought there if pressure is to be exerted on him, ”Olga Sadovskaya, deputy chairman of the Committee Against Torture, told RBC. The organization is based in Nizhny Novgorod, in the region there are many lawyers and advocates who are actively working to protect the rights of prisoners. This is also a factor influencing the statistics on the recovery of compensation in Strasbourg, says Sadovskaya.

In recent years, human rights activists and journalists have been speaking louder and louder about the fact that the rights of prisoners in Russia are bad. On October 5, the Gulagu.net project began publishing videos of prisoners being tortured in Russian prisons. Human rights activists stated that they had at their disposal an archive of videos, documents and photos. These files testify to cases of mass torture in the institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service.

The inmates were raped and beaten, and they extorted money and information with the help of torture. The founder of Gulagu.net, Vladimir Osechkin, said that he received a video from a former prisoner-programmer, who “himself was beaten and tortured, and then they decided to use it as a professional.”

After publications in the media, the IC department for the Saratov region aroused a criminal case under the article on violent acts of a sexual nature committed by a group of persons by prior conspiracy. Head of the Saratov Federal Penitentiary Service filed resign after a video of the torture of men in the regional tuberculosis hospital of the Federal Penitentiary Service No. 1 was published. As a result of the publication of a video with the beating of an inmate of IK-4 in Alekseevka, FSIN officers were excited criminal case in the Belgorod region.