Sverdlovsk temporary detention facility prisoners protest against humiliating treatment by staff

Dmitry Rozhin, a representative of the Public Monitoring Commission of the Sverdlovsk region, and the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Sverdlovsk region, Tatyana Merzlyakova, visited the temporary detention facilities (IVS) in Asbest and Yekaterinburg. In both facilities, violations of sanitary norms for holding prisoners and dismissive, humiliating treatment by IVS staff were noted.

In the Sverdlovsk IVS, where Sverdlovsk human rights activist and member of the Public Monitoring Commission Alexey Sokolov is currently being held, the ombudsman recorded that prisoners do not receive boiled water, and for the entire time they have been under arrest, they have not been taken out for walks.

As reported by Kasparov.ru, Merzlyakova also intends to draw the attention of the Investigative Committee to the fact that their officers do not visit detained persons for long periods of time, sometimes reaching a week. She accepted for consideration a complaint from prisoner Sergey Filipyev, in which he told the ombudsman about the use of violence against him by officers of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Ural Federal District.

The visit to the Asbest IVS was connected with the fact of mass self-mutilation by persons held in the IVS that occurred on 8 May. Human rights activists managed to reconstruct the picture of what happened and establish that sanitary norms for detention are violated in the IVS, and not all prisoners are provided with individual sleeping places. There are no walks, and the shower room has not worked at all for a long time due to the wear and tear of the engineering networks.

Representatives of the local police department agreed with the identified violations, reporting that 3.5 million roubles were allocated in 2009 for the repair of the Asbest IVS. However, as Rozhin asserts, repairing the building will not stop the prisoners’ dissatisfaction.

During the inspection by the member of the Monitoring Commission, it was established that the self-mutilation in the Asbest IVS was not committed by convicts or prisoners under investigation, but by persons who had committed administrative offences (mainly those who did not pay fines for traffic violations).

In total, according to the logbook records and the actual check of the victims, 10 people inflicted cuts on their forearms with razor blades from shaving sets, and not 2 or 8, as previously reported in the media. According to those who ‘cut themselves’, these actions were connected to the improper treatment they received from IVS staff. During a scheduled round, checks of the presence of detainees, and cell searches, the guards threw all the arrested persons’ personal belongings onto the floor (including food). Furthermore, these individuals, in their opinion, were unlawfully prohibited from keeping tea in their cells, and the duty officer did not come to them and paid no attention to their appeals and complaints. Rozhin believes that by resorting to an act of self-mutilation, the prisoners were protesting against the dismissive and humiliating attitude and behaviour towards them by the IVS staff. He added that as long as improper treatment of prisoners continues, they will ‘cut themselves’, and no amount of renovation will help here.