HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
WORLD REPORT 2000
(excerpt)
RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Human Rights Developments
Reform of the criminal justice system remained stalled,
save for several landmark Constitutional Court rulings. The procuracy failed to
investigate torture complaints properly and continued to routinely sanction
arrests made by the police. The courts offered no protection against such
abuses.
Police officers systematically detained suspects under false
pretenses and denied them access to counsel. Police tortured numerous detainees
in order to secure confessions, using methods like beatings, asphyxiation,
electroshock, and suspension by body parts, as well as psychological
intimidation and torture by proxy. Prosecutors used coerced confessions in
court, often as the primary evidence of a defendant's guilt.
The torture of Aleksei Mikheev was a particularly egregious
example of Russian police methods. On September 10, 1998, police in Nizhnii
Novgorod detained Mikheev on misdemeanor charges but subsequently questioned him
regarding the presumed murder and rape of a teenage girl. Mikheev confessed
after police reportedly beat and electroshocked him; when police wanted him to
confess to five more murders, Mikheev jumped out of the third-floor window of
the interrogation room, breaking his spinal cord. Several days later, the girl,
whom Mikheev confessed he murdered, turned up in perfect health.
The procuracy stalled the investigation into Mikheev's torture
allegations, citing-incredibly-his physical condition, and in general failed to
investigate torture complaints promptly and adequately. Such inquiries were
overwhelmingly superficial and plagued with delays,and therefore rarely led to
formal criminal investigations. Procurators generally failed to interview the
complainant or to question alleged abusers; instead, they often forwarded
complaints to police precincts, instructing the police chief to sort out what
had happened.
Despite a general consensus that conditions in pretrial
detention were intolerable, the government, as in previous years, lacked the
political will to tackle the problem. Compounding overcrowding in pretrial
facilities, the procuracy continued its widescale use of custody, often
unnecessarily. For example, as of this writing Il'ia Hoffman had been in
pretrial detention for more than ten months on charges of large-scale computer
fraud. Doctors concluded that conditions in detention directly threatened
Hoffman's life, as he suffers from asthma. In prison, Hoffman contracted
pneumonia three times and the measles once. The procuracy claimed that Hoffman
might attempt to abscond justice, despite the fact that Hoffman had punctually
appeared for interrogations and expert assessments prior to his arrest in
November 1998.
The Procuracy General delayed for another full year the
release of Sergei Mikhailov, who in 1995 was wrongly sentenced to death for the
murder and rape of a minor. Although a procuracy investigator once more
confirmed the conclusions of three earlier investigations that Mikhailov had not
committed the crime, procuracy officials failed to initiate proceedings with the
Supreme Court to overturn Mikhailov's conviction. Mikhailov has been in prison
for five years.
As a result of pretrial detention policies and often tough
sentencing by courts, Russia's prison population continued to increase in 1999:
according to official figures, it grew by 42,000 prisoners in the first five
months of the year. More than one million people were held in Russia's
penitentiary institutions, almost 10 percent of whom suffered from tuberculosis.
Pretrial detention centers held around 300,000 people. About 80,000 of these
inmates contracted serious diseases in detention and about 2,000 of them died
awaiting final court rulings.
In June, the State Duma passed an amnesty, under which up to
94,000 prisoners could be released. However, according to a Ministry of Justice
official, the real number of prisoners released is likely to be closer to
60,000, as disciplinary offenders will not be released. The Moscow Center for
Prison Reform reported that many places vacated by the amnesty were immediately
filled with new inmates. Some officials appeared to see such amnesties, which
have become a yearly event, as a substitute for reform of detention policy.
As of this writing, the State Duma did not adopt a new
criminal procedure code to replace the Soviet-era code. Apparently under
pressure from human rights groups, the presidential administration sent the
draft code to the Council of Europe in late 1998 for an expert assessment on its
compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council of Europe
presented the results, which are not binding on Russia, to the administration in
mid-September. At this writing, the assessment had not been made public. It
remained unclear as to when parliamentary debate on the draft code would resume.
In April, the Constitutional Court found unconstitutional
several provisions in the criminal procedure code that allowed judges to return
criminal cases for further investigation. Because Russian judges are under
pressure not to acquit criminal defendants, they frequently remand cases for
further investigation when the prosecution has not proven the defendant's guilt;
this causes severe delays, sometimes of many years, while defendants languish in
the terrible conditions of pretrial detention. The ruling instructed judges to
issue final decisions on criminal cases: conviction or acquittal.
Significant progress was made toward abolishment of the death
penalty. On February 2, the Constitutional Court issued a ruling prohibiting all
courts from passing death sentences. While the court did not find the death
penalty itself unconstitutional, it argued that violations of the guaranteed
right to a jury trial required that courts be banned from passing death
sentences. Under Russia's constitution, all those facing a possible death
sentence have the right to have their cases examined by a jury. However, jury
trials have been introduced in only nine of Russia's eighty-nine regions;
therefore only a small percentage of defendants facing a possible death sentence
could exercise their constitutional right to a trial by jury.
On June 3, timed to coincide with a major conference on the
death penalty sponsored by the Council of Europe, President Yeltsin signed a
decree commuting the sentences of the last of Russia's 716 death-row prisoners.
In preceding months, Yeltsin had gradually commuted the sentences of all death
row prisoners to life imprisonment or twenty-five years.
