Amnesty International Accuses Russian Police of Systematic Torture

Mos News
Nov. 23, 2006

The Russian police and the courts received a dim appraisal in a report on torture in jails and police stations issued Tuesday by Amnesty International.

The report, quoted by the New York Times daily, documented 114 cases where suspects were beaten to get them to sign confessions.

The 30-page study focused on the bread-and-butter work of the Russian criminal justice system, not on high-profile or politically tinged crimes.

It concluded that a 2001 revision of the criminal justice code with safeguards to prevent abuse was working poorly. “Torture in police custody and pretrial detention is a fact across Russia,” the report said.

The group blamed poor training, low wages, weak courts and a system of promotions that rewards investigators who are good at solving cases, if necessary by forcing suspects to sign confessions. Such quotas are a holdover from the Soviet civil service.

“Our police are obliged to solve a certain number of crimes,” Elena V. Franklin, spokeswoman for Amnesty International in Moscow, said Tuesday. “How they do it, nobody cares.”

The 2001 criminal code requires suspects to have a lawyer present during questioning, but that obligation is often circumvented when the police provide a so-called pocket attorney, who is loyal to the police rather than the defendant.

Also, a Russian law prohibiting courts from accepting evidence obtained through torture is not rigorously enforced, Amnesty said.

The Russian judicial authorities have defended their legal reform effort.

Most abuse takes place in holding tanks at precinct stations. The report documented 30 cases of torture at one ward at a jail in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains. The group cited witnesses’ accounts of a metal table with straps where detainees were restrained, abused and raped.

One victim cited in the Amnesty report, Aleksei N. Dudin, 30, reached by telephone in Yekaterinburg on Tuesday, said he was picked up on murder charges in April 2004 after the owner of an apartment he was trying to buy disappeared.

He was then beaten, he said, and officers demanded that he sign a confession. “They said: ‘Sign it! It was you! You will sign it!’ ” Mr. Dudin said.

He added: “I didn’t sign anything. That is why I am free.”