Committee "Civil Assistance" launches project in defence of imprisoned residents of Chechnya and Ingushetia

On Monday, December 26, the Committee "Civil Assistance" presented its new project "Protection of rights of residents of the Chechen Republic and the Republic of Ingushetia, serving their sentences in penitentiary institutions or kept under investigation in SIZOs (pre-trial prisons)".

The project was launched due to a large number of complaints about discrimination against people from the Caucasus, and, above all, residents of Ingushetia and Chechnya, at detention facilities.

The project was presented by Svetlana Gannushkina, the project manager, Chair of the Committee "Civil Assistance", Akhmet Barakhoev, the project coordinator in the Republic of Ingushetia, Oyub Titiev, the project coordinator in the Chechen Republic, and Nikolai Zboroschenko, the project coordinator in Moscow. The presentation was attended by representatives of human rights organizations, public monitoring commissions of Chechnya and Ingushetia, and media.

According to Svetlana Gannushkina, the project manager, Chairman of the Committee "Civil Assistance", "the problem of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment is a common problem of the penitentiary system of the Russian Federation."

"In our reports, we have repeatedly written that Chechens and Ingushes suffer severely at detention facilities," says Svetlana Gannushkina. "The main reason for that lies in the fact that the law enforcement agencies, including in penitentiary institutions, are staffed with a large number of people, who participated in the war in Chechnya."

According to the human rights defender, the situation of Chechens and Ingushes in prisons is also influenced by "general rise of xenophobia and Chechenophobia in society."

"Chechens and Ingushes face an increased risk of being held criminally liable of fabricated charges," believes Svetlana Gannushkina. "The number of such cases is large. At the beginning of the second wave of hostilities in 1999-2000, there was an obvious setup for intentional isolation of Chechens; at present, decay of the forensic and investigatory system has reached such a level that investigatory authorities simply elect persons from the most vulnerable categories and charge them of crimes."

"Cautious calls directly to colonies, visits of members of public independent commissions (PICs) can in some cases improve a situation of a convict. It happens that for the improvement, administration demands that a convict signs a document stating that he is satisfied with everything and that he has not appealed to anyone with complaints. This puts the human rights defenders in a difficult position and deprives us of the opportunity to defend such "a renegade" in the future," continues the human rights defender.

According to Lilia Yusupova, the project author and initiator, the aim of the project is not just to help a person in every single case, but also to draw public attention to the problem.

"It was hard to write this project," says Lilia Yusupova. "I have seen how our colleagues from other organizations tried to publish the facts; however, till present, there were no specific instruments and financial possibilities, therefore, we contacted the European Commission for our project. Our colleagues from the "Memorial" provided us with the basic material to justify the need to solve the problem, and the late Natasha Estemirova wrote a lot about that. We hope that our efforts will succeed."

Oyub Titiev, the representative of the Chechen Branch of the Human Rights Centre (HRC) "Memorial", stated that the project was launched in this September.

"We can say that this is a pilot project for one year, and we hope that it will be continued," says Oyub Titiev.

Nikolai Zboroschenko, the project coordinator in Moscow, has noted: "The main objectives of the project, which will help to change the penitentiary system in future are to obtain reliable information, to render legal assistance, to restore violated rights of persons at detention facilities, and, of course, to inform society and international organizations."

According to Magomed Mutsolgov, Chairman of the Public Monitoring Commission of the Republic of Ingushetia, the head of the human rights organization "MASHR", the problem of maltreatment at detention facilities has a national character.

"Every year we receive dozens of letters about maltreatment, torture and humiliation at camps and penal colonies in different regions. We have no colonies, which are intended to correct a person, we have colonies, which oppressed and humiliated a person. The most important thing that we can do is to lobby for establishment of penal colonies in our republics in order that people kept at detention facilities could not lose contacts with their families and that they would be constantly in touch with their relatives," offered the human rights defender.