Public control over prisons: an apparent reality

Those who have experienced for themselves what deprivation of liberty in Russian conditions is like, would hardly have perceived as a joke the Federal Law No. 76 ‘On public control over the provision of human rights in places of detention and on assistance to persons in places of detention’ signed by President Medvedev last summer. Now, however, when this law has begun to operate in the regions and public monitoring commissions are being created on its basis (according to ‘Rossiyskaya Gazeta’, there are already more than fifty of them), its obvious lack of seriousness gives it the character not so much of a joke as of a mockery.
I judge this by the example of the Tver region. There are not so many colonies in our region — nine, two of which are medical ones — for tuberculosis patients and drug addicts. There are four pre-trial detention centres, 38 temporary detention facilities (where, as is known, the main violations occur in obtaining the ‘necessary’ testimonies from the arrested) and several other specific places of deprivation of liberty: a hospital, a centre for the detention of juvenile offenders, guardhouses, etc. They are scattered over a territory equal in area to all of Austria.
Now imagine how this huge enterprise will be controlled by six public figures, located in the regional centre, from which it is 300 or more kilometres to many of the institutions under supervision, and who do not have a single kopek of funds for transport and other expenses. (True, in Mordovia, where there are not 9 colonies, as we have, but 20, the situation is even ‘funnier’: there are only five people in the commission there).
But the main ‘fun’ lies in the fact that among the six Tver controllers, there turned out not to be a single human rights activist. There are veterans of the Afghan war, there is ‘Parents Against Drug Addiction’, there are veterans of law enforcement agencies. But there are no human rights activists. Unless, of course, one counts as such the former deputy head of the regional Internal Affairs Directorate for personnel, Vladimir Vorobyov, who is actually the chairman of the PMC for the Tver region. They say he is quite a decent person (I personally do not know him). But how can one get away from the fact that he will have to audit the results of his own work: for it is the personnel that, as we know, decide everything, and especially in the matter of observing the rights of the arrested?
As is known, regional commissions are formed by the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation. At first glance, such a procedure is aimed at the maximum independence of the commissions from those structures that they are supposed to control and from the regional authorities closely linked to them. But a feature of the ‘Putin era’, as many have already noticed, has become the necessity to add the pronoun ‘as if’ to many concepts associated with democratic institutions.
For us, the chamber itself is ‘as if’ public, and it ensures, accordingly, ‘as if’ independence. And, what is especially characteristic, everyone knows this, including those who were in danger of ending up under this ‘as if’ public control.
In any case, Colonel Savikhin, head of the Federal Penitentiary Service for the Tver region, had no doubts about his ability to influence the composition of the monitoring commission (which also monitors him). In any case, in a telephone conversation, he told me directly that he would not allow Galina Buslaeva, who heads the regional branch of the ‘For Human Rights’ organisation, to join the commission. With the note, let us observe, that the priority direction of this organisation’s activity in our region is precisely the protection of the rights of those deprived of liberty.
It is clear that in such a situation, and with practically no possibilities to exercise real control over places of deprivation of liberty, the Tver ‘Memorial’ also did not rush to join the commission.
We still do not know with whom exactly in our region the representatives of the Civic Chamber of the RF communicated during the period of forming the Public Monitoring Commission. In any case, they did not reach out to human rights activists. And when Tatyana Astrakhankina, a former State Duma deputy from the Communist Party, well-known in our region, including for her dislike of human rights activists, was discovered in the list of Civic Chamber figures responsible for the activities of monitoring commissions, everything became more or less clear. It was she, as it turned out, who carried out the ‘technical work’ of forming the commission.
Of course, we are not refusing to interact with the PMC, and we wish it every success. But not in the matter of simulating public control, but in the real protection of the rights of those deprived of liberty. In a country where, according to expert estimates, about a quarter of the population is connected to the ‘zone’ through personal experience or family ties, this problem is hard to call unimportant.