Outsiders are not welcome here
A couple of years ago, almost no one knew what the ONK was, and two years prior to that, Public Monitoring Commissions did not exist at all. But in 2008, in the era of the Medvedev liberalisation and the beginning of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) reform, they appeared. Each region received the opportunity to form a commission — from five to several dozen human rights activists who would walk through colonies and pre-trial detention centres (SIZO) and check how things were there and what complaints were made. And they went.
Everything that we have learned about prisons over the last four years, we know from them. Hunger strikes, cutting veins in protest, criminal cases regarding riots and mass beatings of convicts, investigations into sudden deaths and suicides of inmates — members of the ONK tell us about all of this.
Investigating the circumstances of Sergei Magnitsky’s death, the commission, headed by Valery Borshchev, asked questions of many of those whom, for some reason, the investigation still does not dare to question — for example, doctors and the management of ‘Matrosskaya Tishina’. It was the human rights activists from the ONK who interviewed the psychiatrist Vitaly Kornilov, who was called to the detention centre and who certified Magnitsky’s death, and at the same time said that Dr Alexandra Gauss did not try to resuscitate the arrested lawyer. Unfortunately, the official investigation proved to be not so thorough, and the ONK can only observe, not bring charges.
The observers went to the Pussy Riot participants almost every week, allowing society to follow what was happening to the girls behind bars in almost real-time mode. Members of the ONK appeared to Leonid Razvozzhaev in ‘Lefortovo’ as soon as they learned that the oppositionist was being held in that particular detention centre. The story of Razvozzhaev — the version presented by him personally — was also first told by public observers. But this story forced them to tell another: about the fact that there is no consensus within the ONK and not all human rights activists are equally useful.
After all, this is what happens: first, a certain Anton Tsvetkov, an ONK member, goes to ‘Lefortovo’. He comes out and says: Razvozzhaev is not complaining about torture. Then, when speaking to Tsvetkov, I asked him twenty times how it happened that he did not report what Razvozzhaev had told him (and he did tell him; the human rights activist does not deny this). ‘It is not within my competence,’ Tsvetkov replied with the intonations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs press service, explaining that since Razvozzhaev was not tortured within the walls of the SIZO, he, as a human rights activist, was not obliged to listen to the rest and report it to society — that, he claimed, was the business of the arrested man’s lawyers.
Other ONK members, who were allowed to see Razvozzhaev a day after Tsvetkov (all the same Borshchev, and with him Anna Karetnikova and Zoya Svetova), said that the arrested man was very depressed and described in detail the kidnapping and torture in some basement. He recalled how they threatened him to write a confession and how they handed him over to the investigative team in Izmailovsky Park.
It turns out that two groups of human rights activists have not only two versions of what happened to Razvozzhaev and whether he should be believed, but also two views on how the ONK should work and why it is needed at all.
Anton Tsvetkov, disdainfully calling his colleagues ‘shouters’, says directly that it is better to cooperate with the authorities, not to conflict. And he does cooperate: for example, he reports that members of the organisation ‘Officers of Russia’, which he heads, saw the oppositionist Garry Kasparov bite a policeman. And even at the legislative level: for example, he proposes writing a law on criminal liability for disobeying the police (currently, they are punished administratively). When asked about his human rights achievements, he answers with general phrases: ‘We help people every day, we don’t engage in PR.’ From concrete cases, he recalls that he defended the victims in the case of the murdered football fan Yegor Sviridov.
Anna Karetnikova, who goes to one of the Moscow pre-trial detention centres at least once a week, if not more often, for the whole day, and then writes detailed reports about her visits, says that Tsvetkov is from the so-called ‘security bloc’ of the ONK. The emergence of such blocs in the commissions did not become known today. Back in 2010, human rights activists began to say that people who had previously shown no particular interest in the issues of human rights observance, let alone in prisons, were running for the ‘second convocation’ of the ONK (commissions work for two years, then are re-elected) in almost all Russian regions. Veteran organisations of law enforcement officers, unions of various kinds of retirees, and other voluntary police helpers:
people loyal to or directly connected to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Federal Penitentiary Service began to submit applications for participation in the ONK. Where there was one person, where there were two or three, and where there were five, as in the Moscow ONK, — people who could not be suspected of intending to become human rights activists nominally became them.
And then, for almost two years, nothing happened. All these security-official-human-rights-activists simply took up space in the commissions and occasionally made statements to the effect that policemen were doing a good job and observing human rights (at mass actions, for example, during the detention of their participants). No reports from detention centres and colonies were received from them. The Razvozzhaev case changed the situation: now, human rights activists with a law-enforcement bias, presenting themselves as members of the ONK (which are associated with completely different people), speak about what convicts or arrested persons tell them, omitting a part of what they hear or interpreting it very loosely. Tsvetkov quoted Razvozzhaev, pulling his words out of context — and for a day, all media quoted him.
But that is not the end either. Now Anton Tsvetkov is going to go further and exclude from the ONK those who have worked in them these past two years. Specifically, Zoya Svetova and Anna Karetnikova. The leader of ‘Officers of Russia’ suspects the human rights activists of illegal video recording in the cells of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina from Pussy Riot. Honestly, he is not the only one suspecting it; the Federal Penitentiary Service is conducting its own check. It would be a shame if this story really deprives Karetnikova and Svetova of the opportunity to be re-elected.
The new commission will be formed as early as next year. The Medvedev liberalisation has ended, and the leadership of the Federal Penitentiary Service changed again a few months ago. Anton Tsvetkov, they say, has long wanted to become the chairperson of the ONK.