Mimicry or a desire for change?

On 12 August, the Cabinet of Ministers issued a decree on the dismissal of Vasyl Koshchynets from his position as head of the State Department for the Execution of Sentences. (Admittedly, the former head may still challenge the Cabinet’s decision regarding the legality of his dismissal in court. It is fashionable, and sometimes, as in the case of Svyatoslav Piskun, even effective... though only briefly.)

Appointed by Viktor Yushchenko in March 2005, the head of the department held his position for four years and was dismissed almost immediately—or, more precisely, 12 days after the entry into force of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine resolution ‘On the Approval of the Statute of the State Department of Ukraine for the Execution of Sentences’, according to which the authority to appoint and dismiss the head of the State Department was transferred from the President to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.

Insightful journalists immediately saw political motives behind the Prime Minister’s interest in the dismissal of Vasyl Koshchynets, as the presidential elections were looming. According to the journalists’ logic, for Yulia Tymoshenko, as a potential candidate for the presidency, 144.4 thousand prisoner votes would certainly not be superfluous. Moreover, the mere dismissal of Vasyl Koshchynets could be expected to bolster the electorate through the relatives of convicts, who have already suffered immensely under the ‘humanised’ criminal-executive system led by Vasyl Koshchynets.

The four years of Koshchynets’s management of one of the most complex state structures were marked by the imitation of vigorous activity aimed at the supposed reform of the criminal-executive system. Year after year, the department victoriously reported on the consistent implementation of the State Programme for Improving Conditions for Convicts and Persons in Custody. Meanwhile, its leadership, as if in a state of meditation, tirelessly spoke about the liberalisation of criminal-executive policy; the humanisation of the execution of criminal sentences; successes in bringing the conditions of convicts and persons in custody into compliance with legislative requirements and European norms and standards; the desire to ensure the unconditional observance of human and civil rights in places of detention; and the stable functioning of bodies, institutions for the execution of sentences, remand prisons, enterprises, healthcare facilities, and educational institutions of the State Criminal-Executive Service.

But in reality, throughout this time, the conditions for keeping people in places of detention remained inhumane. Mortality and the number of suicides among prisoners continued to rise in these institutions, which in no way aligned with the definitions declared by the leadership.
According to the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, 130–135 people die annually in remand prisons since 2004. 28 out of 32 remand prisons are unsuitable for long-term detention.

According to human rights defenders, during the period 2004–2009, despite a reduction in the number of people held in places of detention, mortality in penal colonies rose from 4.30 per thousand people to 4.87. During the same period, the number of suicides in the institutions of the penal system increased from 41 to 54. The number of HIV-infected individuals nearly tripled, increasing from 1,917 in 2004 to 5,073 in 2009. Between 75.5% and 91.5% of prisoners are infected with the hepatitis C virus. The rate of tuberculosis in the department’s institutions also remains very high.

The figures provided eloquently testify to the non-observance and systematic violations in the institutions of the penal system of such fundamental human rights as the right to life and health, justice and due process, humane treatment, and protection from cruelty and torture.

According to the law, the purpose of the criminal-executive system is to protect the interests of the individual, society, and the state by creating conditions for the correction and resocialisation of convicts. In practice, educational work in the institutions of the criminal-executive system was effectively replaced by measures of brutal subjugation of convicts, accompanied by daily humiliation of their human dignity and physical violence. In the parlance of the staff of the criminal-executive service, these ‘methods of education’ are cynically classified as (I quote) ‘purposeful work on neutralising the influence of persons capable of organising illegal actions, the consequence of which could be the destabilisation of the operational situation in institutions for the execution of sentences.’

As a result of the system’s ‘purposeful’ work, a relentless stream of complaints from convicts and their relatives regarding inhumane conditions of detention, lack of medical care, slave labour exploitation, the blatant disregard by the management of institutions and the State Department for the Execution of Sentences for the problems of prisoners, and the cruel treatment of them by penitentiary staff, continued—and continues—to reach human rights defenders, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, and the President of Ukraine.

As a rule, instead of conducting an objective investigation into the complaints, the administration forces the complainants to retract their statements through threats and, quite often, physical pressure. The defiant are brutally beaten and thrown into punitive isolation cells, where neither lawyers nor relatives have access to them. The only means of protest available to convicts against the arbitrariness of the institution’s staff is to declare a hunger strike. But even this turns into a brutal beating. Out of fear of physical reprisal, convicts slit their veins or inflict other bodily injuries upon themselves, after which they end up not in the medical unit or a hospital, but back in the same punitive isolation cell. Meanwhile, the department’s leadership informs human rights defenders that the facts set out in the complaints were not confirmed.

Human rights defenders have appealed to the President of the country dozens of times with the demand to replace the bankrupt leadership of the State Department for the Execution of Sentences, seeing in its unprofessionalism and limitless arbitrariness not only the cause of systematic violations of the rights of those deprived of liberty but also a serious threat to public safety. Admittedly, they demanded the dismissal not only of Vasyl Koshchynets but also of his deputies, Mykola Iltyai and Nataliya Kalashnyk. For it was precisely this ‘trio’ that formed an impeccable group of makeup artists for the cosmetic masking of the system’s festering sores.

While Professor and Deputy Head of the State Department for the Execution of Sentences Nataliya Kalashnyk, who oversees, in particular, the department’s socio-psychological service, in her concern for professional development of personnel and ensuring the Department has qualified psychologists, sent applicants to study at Kharkiv National University under the Department’s quota—applicants whose level of preparation left the psychology faculty’s lecturers clutching their heads;

While, for educational purposes, Ms. Nataliya selflessly organised ostentatious patriotic festivals, competitions, quizzes, spartakiads, and gatherings such as ceremonial events on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Proclamation of the Unification Act of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the West Ukrainian People’s Republic or in celebration of International Mother Language Day—Mr. Iltyai, the first deputy and now acting head of the department, was successfully carrying out measures aimed at ‘maintaining proper public order, reliable isolation, supervision of convicts, and the timely detection and prevention of negative manifestations and conflict situations within the convict environment.’

It was precisely after his visits to penal colonies for the purpose of ‘investigating’ prisoner complaints or extraordinary events, such as the declaration of a mass hunger strike in protest against inhumane conditions, that the notorious ‘mask-show’ raids (brutal beating of convicts by masked men) occurred, after which the ‘instigators’ (read: complainants) were scattered across zones in various corners of Ukraine and punished in isolation, left to rot in ‘solitary confinement’, punitive isolation cells, or had their prison terms extended with the help of the infamous Article 391 of the Criminal Code (malicious disobedience to the administration of a correctional institution). By the way, Mr. Iltyai, for his extremely ‘effective’ work in maintaining ‘proper’ order in the institutions of the criminal-executive system over the last few years, has been a permanent nominee for the human rights ‘Thistle of the Year’ anti-award.

And now, after the dismissal of Vasyl Koshchynets, the Cabinet of Ministers has placed this very same ‘reformer’—Mykola Iltyai—as the acting head of the State Department for the Execution of Sentences (?).

Another quite real contender for the head’s chair, according to information from competent sources, is the Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, Professor, and Deputy to Vasyl Koshchynets—Nataliya Hryhorivna Kalashnyk. Never mind that the work of the very departments of the administration that were curated by the Professor (namely healthcare, the fight against tuberculosis and AIDS, and the work of the department’s socio-psychological service) proved to be a failure. By all appearances, Ms. Nataliya knows well how to pick the keys to the necessary doors.

It is probably no coincidence that, before the dismissal of Vasyl Koshchynets, representatives of the Department for the Execution of Sentences often saw Nataliya Kalashnyk together with Yulia Tymoshenko’s daughter. ‘Nataliya Hryhorivna invites Yevheniya to events, travels with her to colonies, gifts her books, and calls her "Zhenechka,"’ reports the independent online publication ‘Forpost’. Indeed, on 25 July, Yevheniya Tymoshenko-Carr was the guest of honour at the latest stage of the XVIII Festival of Amateur Artistic Creativity of Convicts ‘Chervona Kalyna’, which took place at the Kremenchuk Juvenile Correctional Colony, reports ‘Telegraf’.

As irony would have it, it was in Kremenchuk, two days later, that an event occurred which, by all appearances, became the final straw in Vasyl Koshchynets’s career. On 27 July, in Kremenchuk Colony No. 69, after consuming a ‘cocktail’ containing ‘Dragon’ glue, 5 people died and four more were hospitalised. Who would have thought that two events, occurring almost simultaneously and almost in the same place, would accumulate the fate of the past and future (?) leadership of the criminal-executive service.

But if the past of the department’s leadership is already clear, the prospect of the future does not seem bright to everyone. While the head of the International Public Organisation ‘International League for the Protection of Citizens’ Rights of Ukraine’, Eduard Bagirov, believes that Vasyl Koshchynets’s successor has the power to change the system because she is assertive and possesses fighting qualities, members of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group are of a different opinion. ‘The fact that Koshchynets was removed is a plus. He was simply not in the right place. But if they appoint Kalashnyk, it will become much worse,’ believes the co-chairman of the organisation, Yevhen Zakharov.

The position of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group is shared by the vast majority of human rights defenders who have had the ‘pleasure’ of not only hearing the scathing speeches of the ‘assertive’ deputy head of the department but also seeing her actions. For example, this spring, participants of a roundtable dedicated to the problems of the penitentiary system had the opportunity to witness the ‘fighting qualities’ of Nataliya Kalashnyk’s character. When the coordinator of the Vinnytsia Human Rights Group, Dmytro Hroisman, informed Nataliya Hryhorivna that two convicts were dying in one of the institutions due to a lack of medical care, she immediately dialled the number of the institution’s head and gave him such a dressing-down that those present at the conversation felt uncomfortable hearing it.

For the second time, Nataliya Kalashnyk mentioned the fate of the two convicts just a few days ago. Calling the human rights defender to talk about her plans for reforming the system and to complain about the old and current leadership of the department, which hinders her from protecting the rights of prisoners, Ms. Nataliya added: ‘You see, we managed to help the people together with you...’
‘No, on the contrary, there was no help at all; it only got worse,’ the human rights defender replied to her.

Ms. Kalashnyk’s attempts to find support in the human rights community have not been successful. To date, about a dozen human rights organisations have already appealed to the Prime Minister of Ukraine and the Cabinet of Ministers with a call to hold consultations with the public regarding other candidates for the position of head of the State Department for the Execution of Sentences. In open letters, human rights defenders emphasise the importance of ensuring a complete renewal of the department’s leadership, taking into account the professional qualities of the candidates, respect for human rights, and an understanding of the necessity of reforming the system of execution of sentences.

Whether the Cabinet will listen to the opinion of human rights defenders depends on what goal the Prime Minister was actually pursuing in dismissing Vasyl Koshchynets from his position.


Afterword. While this article was being prepared, it became known from informed sources that it is tomorrow that the Cabinet of Ministers intends to appoint the head of the State Department for the Execution of Sentences. Among the contenders are Mykola Iltyai, Nataliya Kalashnyk, and... Vasyl Koshchynets.
In our wonderland, where politicians juggle decrees, resolutions, orders, and laws like in a circus, one cannot be certain of anything.