Public Oversight Forum in Russia

The second All-Russian Forum of Heads of Public Oversight Commissions (POC) took place in Moscow. The Forum brought together the leaders of commissions from 47 regions of Russia, where the procedure for re-electing the composition of POCs was recently completed. Many of the Forum’s participants were elected as POC heads for the second time, and some had worked as ordinary members of the commissions before. However, there were also newcomers.
The main topics of discussion were the interaction of POCs with the structures being inspected and the procedures for gaining entry into places of forced detention of citizens. Issues regarding the material provision of the commissions’ activities were also discussed. After all, in regions such as Yakutia or the Krasnoyarsk Territory, where it is sometimes impossible to manage without a helicopter, this is a very important issue. Special attention was paid to resolving issues of providing medical assistance to individuals in places of forced detention of citizens.
The speakers demonstrated a fairly wide range of attitudes towards the authorities. For example, a representative from the Chelyabinsk region, mentioning the resonant event in the city of Kopeysk, said that the circumstances of those events were studied by local and General Prosecutor’s Office bodies (there must have been serious problems...), but he has no reason to distrust the conclusions of these bodies, meaning there are no grounds for the commission to intervene regarding what happened there and whether citizens' rights were violated. Conversely, the achievements noted at the Forum were credited precisely to those commissions where there are active human rights defenders with experience in protecting citizens’ rights.
Some participants in their speeches praised the authorities a bit too much, presenting their overly favourable attitude as their own opinion, to which everyone, undoubtedly, has the right.
Nothing was said at the Forum about the difficulties of electing new compositions of POCs, about the reasons why representatives of public organisations who had worked quite actively and effectively in the previous composition were refused entry into the new composition of the commissions. The impression was that for most Forum participants, these problems do not exist.
In a number of speeches, the need for improving the legal regulation of the detention of individuals in places of forced detention of citizens was noted, including the POC’s main Law-76.
The Forum was visited by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay. The speech of the Ukrainian representative on the implementation of public oversight of similar places in Ukraine was listened to with interest. By the way, in Ukraine, a similar law common to all law enforcement agencies is absent, and there are not even any proposals regarding its adoption.
A key moment at the Forum can be considered the speech of Markus Jaeger, Head of the Department for Legal Support and Interaction with National Structures working in the field of human rights, from the Council of Europe. He highlighted a number of important differences in the implementation of public oversight in Russia and other Council of Europe countries where similar institutions exist.
In Europe, representatives of these institutions work on a professional basis and their work is paid for, whereas in Russia (as in Ukraine) it is carried out on a voluntary basis, and for the activities of the POC, its members have to find resources or spend their own.
In European countries, members of such institutions are appointed by parliament, which ensures their significant independence from other state structures. There, they visit places of forced detention of citizens without warning. Moreover, these institutions do not work on individual complaints from citizens, but study the general conditions of the operation of places of forced detention of citizens.
It is different in Russia. POC members must warn about their visits to the places being inspected; they are often amateurs, not specialists in the issues of detaining citizens in places of forced detention. In their activities, a lot of attention is paid precisely to responding to citizens’ complaints. POC members are appointed by the Public Chamber, which has the right to revoke their powers, which makes their independence conditional to a certain extent.
What are the main impressions and conclusions from participating in the Forum?
It was striking that top officials from the agencies — the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Penitentiary Service Administration, the Ministry of Defence, the Prosecutor General’s Office — were not at the Forum, having not come, thereby signalling the degree of importance for themselves of the issues discussed at the Forum. They sent their deputies or, in general, heads of departments. For some reason, there were no representatives of Russia’s leading human rights organisations — the Moscow Helsinki Group, Memorial, and others (except in cases where a representative of such an organisation was the head of a regional POC).
In conclusion, it is worth noting two main things.
First: In Russia, the state pays serious attention to the problems of developing public oversight of places of forced detention of citizens, and for this, a special Law has been adopted. And second: there are many organisations and activists in the country who consider it necessary to invest their strength, knowledge, experience, and time in the activities of POCs and their development. One can hope that this will eventually yield the desired result.

Oleksandr Bukalov, “Donetsk Memorial”, Forum participant