Human rights activists criticized the bill on punishment for torture – RBK

According to the definition offered by parliamentarians, torture is “any act by which a person is intentionally inflicted with severe pain or suffering, physical or mental, in order to obtain information or confessions from him or from a third party, punish him for an act that he committed or a third party or of whom he is suspected of committing, as well as intimidate or coerce him or a third party, or for any reason based on discrimination of any nature. ” At the same time, the authors of the bill propose to indicate that the pain and suffering arising from legal sanctions and are inseparable from them, or arise by chance, are not torture.

The authors of the document are the heads of the State Duma and Federation Council committees on legislation and state construction Pavel Krasheninnikov and Andrei Klishas, ​​as well as Senator Vladimir Poletaev. The draft amendments were supported by the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice, the President’s State and Legal Department and Human Rights Ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova.

Human rights activists “welcome the efforts of Russian lawmakers,” but consider the proposed changes “extremely unfortunate,” the statement said. They insist that a new separate article “Torture” should appear in the Criminal Code, and instead of it, parliamentarians propose “surrogate norms”, the adoption of which “will not lead to the eradication of torture in Russia and will not allow effective prosecution of all those responsible.”

Thus, the addition of the article on abuse of office with the clause “with the use of torture” implies an approach to torture not as an independent crime, but as an extreme degree of abuse of authority: “It is suggested that there is some kind of official authority that contains risks of becoming torture. However, the Russian law enforcement agencies do not have such powers, ”the statement reads. To accept such an amendment means “to consolidate an approach that is paradoxical from a legal point of view,” NGO representatives believe.

Most often, in cases of torture, “criminals act in a group, very consistently, methodically, distributing roles among themselves,” but the proposed bill excludes the possibility of accurately qualifying these circumstances: it does not include the possibility of taking into account the group nature of torture or its commission by prior conspiracy.

The legislator’s proposed definition of torture is close to the definition in UN Conventions Against Torture, but, unlike it, allows to bring to justice only the direct perpetrators of torture. Human rights defenders believe that the heads of the institution or unit in whose jurisdiction they took place should also bear responsibility for them. The UN considers all government officials involved in torture, at whose instigation, with whose knowledge or tacit consent they occur.

If the amendments are adopted, abuse of power with the use of torture will have a 15-year statute of limitations for criminal prosecution. The authors of the statement believe that “such a crime as torture should not have a statute of limitations.”

Similar amendments to the article of the Criminal Code on coercion to testify will lead to “duplication of norms”, which in turn will inevitably entail “arbitrary enforcement”, human rights activists believe. At the same time, they note a positive aspect: according to the current Criminal Code, only investigators are considered as possible subjects of coercion to testify. But violence, threats and intimidation are usually not used by them, and as a result, Article 302 of the Criminal Code is practically not applied. The amendments propose to expand the field of subjects of such a crime to any employee of law enforcement agencies, and this is good, according to representatives of NGOs.

In early October, the Gulagu.net project (the site has been blocked since July by Roskomnadzor on the basis of the decision of the Moscow City Court) published videos from the FSIN archive, where cases of torture and rape of convicts were recorded at the FSIN # 1 tuberculosis hospital in Saratov. The video archive with torture, according to the project manager Vladimir Osechkin, was taken out of Russia by the programmer Sergei Savelyev, who was also serving his sentence in a prison hospital in Saratov.

After the publication of the torture video, the FSIN announced the dismissal of 18 employees, the Investigative Committee opened seven criminal cases, including against the former head of the hospital, Pavel Gatsenko, and the head of the security department of the institution, Sergei Maltsev. On November 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin fired the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Alexander Kalashnikov. At the same time, the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said that “he would not establish any direct connection” between the torture and the dismissal of the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service. According to him, Kalashnikov was fired at his own request.