Who is under house arrest abroad, and for what?

Abroad, those accused of minor crimes, elderly and ill criminals, as well as political opponents, are placed under house arrest. The most famous prisoner in the world is the opposition leader of Myanmar (a country in South East Asia) and Nobel Peace Prize laureate and human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest for 14 years and whose release has been called for by heads of many countries of the world. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat spent the final years of his life under house arrest. Following the recent protests in Tehran, the majority of Iranian opposition leaders are under house arrest. In Kazakhstan, last December, the 66-year-old chief engineer of JSC 'Transstroymost', Mukhit Bekmagambetov, was placed under house arrest following the death of 12 people due to the collapse of a bridge under construction over the Ural River.
House arrest can prove a compromise when a citizen of one country is detained in another at the request of a third, and the first country does not consider its citizen to be a criminal. This is what happened with director Roman Polanski, who is currently under house arrest in Switzerland and whose movements the police monitor using an electronic bracelet. The USA is demanding the extradition of Polanski, a French citizen, for trial in a case involving the seduction of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer, which occurred in 1977. The victim has long since dropped her claims and received financial compensation, but formally, the case against the director has not been closed.
Furthermore, house arrest can be a transitional stage between freedom and prison. The creator of the largest financial pyramid in history, Bernard Madoff, was under house arrest for the first three months after he was charged. Admittedly, Madoff was subsequently sent to prison, and later the 70-year-old financier was sentenced to 150 years of imprisonment for fraud. Former Prime Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Lazarenko spent three years under house arrest in the USA before receiving nine years in prison for 'financial abuse'. According to the UN, during his premiership (1996–1997), Lazarenko stole about 200 million dollars from his country’s treasury.
However, the opposite can also occur. The other day, the Jerusalem District Court transferred a 55-year-old man, accused of polygamy and sexual relations with his 16-year-old stepdaughter, from prison to house arrest. According to police, the accused held wedding ceremonies with each of his five wives according to Jewish custom. The defence claims that the man had only one wife, that the other women were friends, and that the stepdaughter turned out to be an 'unstable young person prone to sleeping with whoever she pleased'. At the end of last year, the leader of the Kyrgyz movement 'For Justice', the former Foreign Minister of that country, Alikbek Jekshenkulov, was also transferred to house arrest. Prior to that, he had spent six months in a pre-trial detention centre on charges of murdering a Turkish businessman who, according to the investigation, was shot with the former minister Jekshenkulov’s presentation pistol.
House arrest can have its 'repeat offenders'. One of them is the Israeli physicist Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years for disclosing information about the Israeli nuclear bomb to journalists, and one of whose conditions for release was a ban on communicating with the press and foreigners. Vanunu has already been placed under house arrest for an interview with an Iranian television channel, and at the end of last year, he was caught having contact with a Norwegian citizen. The accused claimed that the Norwegian woman was his mistress and that he did not discuss Israel’s nuclear programme with her. But the court sentenced Vanunu to three days of house arrest and upheld the previously imposed ban on approaching foreign embassies.
Furthermore, house arrest is chosen as a preventive measure in cases where the accused is too important to be put in prison, but the crime is too serious to be left without attention. For example, at the end of last year, the Indian politician and one of the leaders of the 'Goa Save Front' party, 34-year-old John Fernandes, was placed under house arrest; he is suspected of beating and raping a 25-year-old Russian woman who worked at one of the resort’s hotels. Forensic experts confirmed the rape and recorded 13 bruises on the young woman’s body, but police did not consider this sufficient grounds to put the politician in prison. The story of the now ex-Minister of Internal Affairs of Moldova, Gheorghe Papuc, shows how such cases can end. In March 2008, he was removed from his post and placed under house arrest in connection with alleged complicity in the smuggling of 200 kilogrammes of Afghan heroin. However, in the autumn of 2008, Papuc was returned to his former post.
Prepared by Alexander KOLESNICHENKO