 Graham Jones lives in Sheffield and has a lifelong interest in human rights in the Soviet Union and Russia. He was Amnesty International UK country coordinator for Russia and the Former Soviet Union for eleven years.
Masha Karp is a trustee of Rights in Russia and a London-based freelance journalist with a special interest in relations between Russia and the West. Her articles have been published by The Independent, Standpoint, The Spectator, Open Democracy, The Common Review, Open Democracy, and in Russian by Inostrannaya Literatura. Masha was Russian Features editor (1997-2009) and previously a producer (1991-1997) with the BBC Russian Service. Her programmes on cultural, political and social issues are available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/indepth/radio_archives.shtml. She also produced, presented and participated in Radio 4 and the BBC World Service radio programmes in English (including Crossing Continents, Word of Mouth, New Europe, Assignment, Pick of the World and Outlook) and in the live BBC World Television show Europe Direct. Masha is a translator of English and German poetry and prose into Russian and has published translations of many writers, including Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Jennings, Alice Munro, Andreas Griffius and Nicolaus Lenau, as well as articles on translation. She is a member of the St Petersburg Writers' Union and the Literary Translators Guild in Russia and a member of the UK Chartered Institute of Linguists. She is chair of the Pushkin Club in Britain. |
posted 16 Feb 2012 05:52 by Rights in Russia
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updated 16 Feb 2012 06:04
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16 February 2012
By Graham JonesThe Moscow Times has reported on the banning of the demonstration involving Lego men and Kinder toys staged by pro democracy activists in the Altai regional city of Barnaul. The demonstration application specified the likely participants as 100 Kinder Surprise toys, 100 Lego men, 20 toy soldiers, 15 stuffed animals and 10 toy cars. The opposition group planned to attach signs to the toys with slogans denouncing violations of election law in advance of the Russian Presidential elections in March. [ Read more] |
posted 16 Feb 2012 03:49 by Rights in Russia
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updated 28 Feb 2012 01:55
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16 February 2012
By Masha KarpUnequal Sides of the Triangle From 19th January to 9th February 2012 BBC2 showed a four-part documentary, ‘Putin, Russia and the West’ (series producer - Norma Percy, series director - Paul Mitchell, executive producer – Brian Lapping, BBC executive producer – Fiona Campbell). The film caused a great deal of controversy (see for example Vladimir Bukovsky and Masha Slonim [in Russian], and Victor Davidoff [in English], and comment in the UK press [see pieces by Luke Harding in The Guardian and Peter Oborne in The Telegraph]).Here Masha Karp reviews the fourth part of the documentary for Rights in Russia (her reviews of the previous parts of the documentary can be read here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) Under the Spell of Myths The main impression of the “New Start” - the final part of the series – is that, luckily, real life intervened to expose the wrong focus that the film-makers had chosen to treat the relations between Putin, Russia and the West. Of course, it did not help the film, which bears all the traces of a hurried adaptation to developing political circumstances, but I think it would have been even worse if it had been released before the December events in Russia. As it is, the film’s viewers get a glimpse of crowds protesting in the streets with slogans like “Putin Out”, “Fair Elections” and “Down with the Party of Crooks and Thieves.” They don’t know why these people have suddenly taken to the streets, but at least they see them there. If the protests had not happened the film-makers perhaps would not have known that anything was wrong with Russian society: they were busy dealing with events on a much grander scale. [ Read more] |
posted 16 Feb 2012 02:41 by Rights in Russia
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updated 28 Feb 2012 02:04
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By Masha Karp
Unequal Sides of the Triangle From 19th January to 9th February 2012 BBC2 broadcast a four-part documentary, ‘Putin, Russia and the West’ (series producer - Norma Percy, series director - Paul Mitchell, executive producer – Brian Lapping, BBC executive producer – Fiona Campbell). The film caused a great deal of controversy (see for example Vladimir Bukovsky and Masha Slonim [in Russian], and Victor Davidoff [in English], and comment in the UK press [see pieces by Luke Harding inThe Guardian and Peter Oborne in The Telegraph]).Here Masha Karp reviews the third part of the documentary for Rights in Russia (her reviews of the other parts of the documentary can
be read here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4)
The title sequence for all four episodes of 'Putin, Russia and the West' ends with a still of American and Russian leaders - American and Russian flags behind them - sitting at the top of a glass table, so that their reflections are visible too. In the first two parts we see Bush and Putin at the table. In the third, wittily, as if by an afterthought, they are suddenly joined by Medvedev. The fourth presents Obama, Medvedev and Putin, the latter two having swapped places in the friendly reshuffle. By the end of the final part, it becomes obvious that it is these people at the table that the film-makers are primarily fascinated by - they prefer seeing the world in the binary opposition between Russia and America (thus uncannily mirroring Russia’s own insistence on seeing American interference everywhere) and believe that there is nothing more interesting than top-level diplomacy. In real life, of course, top-level diplomacy can be fascinating when real issues are at stake, and incredibly boring when there is just a lot of hot air. Part 3 of the series is an example of the first of these two, and Part 4 is an example of the second. This is what largely determines the impact of each of these two final parts of the documentary. [ Read more]
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posted 12 Feb 2012 11:37 by Rights in Russia
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updated 12 Feb 2012 12:36
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By Graham Jones
Lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people face a dangerous and unjust world and in some places around the world the situation is just getting worse. The bill currently passing through the regional legislative assembly of St. Petersburg, Russia, is seeking to ban "public actions" and "propaganda" around "sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality and transgenderness." This is an assault on the freedom of expression of Russia's LGBT community. [ Read more]
Graham Jones lives in Sheffield and has a lifelong interest in human rights in the Soviet Union and Russia. He was Amnesty International UK country coordinator for Russia and the Former Soviet Union for eleven years.
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posted 2 Feb 2012 10:38 by Rights in Russia
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updated 28 Feb 2012 02:02
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Unequal Sides of the Triangle
On 19 and 26 January 2012 BBC2 showed the first two parts of a four-part documentary, ‘Putin, Russia and the West’ (series producer - Norma Percy, series director - Paul Mitchell, executive producer – Brian Lapping, BBC executive producer – Fiona Campbell). The film has caused a great deal of controversy (see for example Vladimir Bukovsky and Masha Slonim [in Russian], and Victor Davidoff [in English], and comment in the UK press [see pieces by Luke Harding in The Guardian and Peter Oborne in The Telegraph]). Here Masha Karp reviews the second part of the documentary for Rights in Russia (her reviews of the other parts of the documentary can
be read here: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4)
Six Years Later The ‘spy rock’ story, publicized by the BBC as the main scoop of the series, has nearly overshadowed the rest of the second part of the documentary ‘Putin, Russia and the West’ (director Wanda Koscia), so much attention – and not without reason – has it already attracted. The ‘sensation’ comes in the opening clip of the film: Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, admits that the ‘spy rock’ used by the FSB in 2006 to accuse Russian human rights’ NGOs of taking money from British spies, is not, after all, an FSB invention. It did in fact exist. If this really was as much of a sensation for Britain as the filmmakers claim, one wonders why it had gone completely unnoticed throughout the publicity campaign for The Strongman, a new book about Putin published in December 2011, where Powell’s statement first appeared (page 149). [ Read more] |
posted 30 Jan 2012 04:40 by Rights in Russia
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updated 28 Feb 2012 01:59
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Unequal Sides of the Triangle by Masha KarpOn 19 January 2012 BBC2 began screening a four-part documentary, “Putin, Russia and the West” (Series Producer - Norma Percy, Series Director - Paul Mitchell, Executive Producer – Brian Lapping, BBC Executive Producer – Fiona Campbell). The film has already caused a great deal of controversy (see, for example, comments by Vladimir Bukovsky and Masha Slonim [in Russian], and Victor Davidoff [in English]). Masha Karp reviews the first part of the documentary for Rights and Russia (her reviews of the subsequent parts of the documentary can
be read here: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
Imagine Colonel Gaddafi is still alive. Imagine he announces he will rule Libya for another 40 years, setting off street protests demanding his resignation. Imagine, then, that at this point, just as a new stage in his rule is about to begin, the BBC brings out a documentary “Gaddafi, Libya and the West”, where apart from westerners we see only Gaddafi himself, his leading politicians and people working for his propaganda unit. No Libyan opposition leaders (apart from those who used to occupy top posts in the government), no journalists, no ordinary people. The greater part of all the major atrocities of the regime is omitted, and as far as the West is concerned the narrative generally follows the official Libyan line: “Don’t interfere with our internal affairs!” Do you think the BBC viewer will be getting an objective picture of the situation in Libya? As the Russian saying goes: every comparison is lame. But what the BBC is showing us in the four-part documentary “Putin, Russia and the West” is very similar to the scenario described above. There is not much of the real Russia there: the film concentrates on Putin’s concept of the West and (partly) the West’s concept of Putin. A rather important part of the triangle – Russia! - is all but missing. And all this in a brilliantly crafted documentary made by the team deservedly famous for making “The Second Russian Revolution” and “The Death of Yugoslavia”. [ Read more]
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posted 5 Oct 2011 11:41 by Rights in Russia
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updated 11 Oct 2011 01:55
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Simon Cosgrove Editor of Rights in Russia Reprinted by kind permission of Current History: A Journal of Contemporary World Affairs On May 12 of this year, Russia’s oldest human rights organization, the Moscow Helsinki Group, celebrated its 35th anniversary (it was founded by a group of 11 dissidents in the Moscow apartment of the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov). On June 18 of this year, Elena Bonner — Sakharov’s widow and also a founding member of the group — died in Boston at the age of 88. It was Bonner who in Oslo in 1975 read Sakharov’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, which discussed the “original and decisive significance of civic and political rights.” Now, 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, how far has Russia come in achieving protection of these rights? What we find, unfortunately, are a great many remaining problems, among them a continuing lack of political will. Over the past decade in particular the gulf between the state and civil society that characterized the Soviet period has taken on new life, albeit in a modified form. As a result of this divide, violations of human rights are endemic in contacts between the state and civil society at every level, while state power–holders enjoy considerable autonomy and are able to manipulate judicial and democratic institutions. Hopeful vision
This is not how it was supposed to be. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw a blossoming of civil society activism and reformist political leadership that jointly promised to “tame” the Soviet state and narrow, if not eradicate, the state-society divide. The reforms of the late 1980s and 1990s were, for many, built on an optimism inspired by the vision of an empowered civil society embedded in a liberal, market-oriented economy with strong institutions of democratic governance.
This broad, hopeful vision has continued to motivate Russia’s human rights community. Yet the reforms of the 1990s also impoverished and effectively disenfranchised a large proportion of the population, while political elites used state power to corruptly garner the benefits of privatization and entrench themselves beyond the reach of civil society. After 2000, then-President Vladimir Putin, under the slogans of “consolidation” and “dictatorship of the law,” moved to re-establish the supremacy of the state.
In the current context, demands to observe human rights are perceived, as before, as a direct challenge to those in power. Today’s rights situation in Russia is characterized by four grave problems: the dangerous vulnerability of human rights defenders, who are exposed to physical attack that law enforcement agencies and the courts seem powerless to protect against, and who are often denigrated as “politicized” by those in power; the lack of independence of a subservient judicial system; resolute action by authorities to control civil society, curtailing in particular the rights of assembly, association, and speech; and the failure of Russia’s leadership to meet its international obligations to uphold the rule of law and protect human rights.
Lyudmila Alekseeva, a founding member and current chair of the Moscow Helsinki Group, in opening a conference that celebrated the group’s 35th anniversary, drew a comparison between Soviet times and contemporary Russia, focusing on the great personal risks run by human rights defenders today. While rights defenders are less often imprisoned nowadays than in Soviet times, she noted, “in former times they never used to kill people for human rights work.”
Voices silenced
Alekseeva cited the recent cases of three murdered human rights defenders, and one who at the time she spoke was in prison: Anna Politkovskaya, the outspoken journalist renowned for her fearless reporting on Chechnya, shot dead in the entrance to her apartment building in 2006; Stanislav Markelov, a human rights lawyer who acted for Politkovskaya among others, gunned down on a Moscow street along with journalist Anastasia Baburova in 2009; Natalya Estemirova, an award-winning human rights defender and staff member of the Memorial Human Rights Center based in Grozny, abducted and murdered in 2009; and Aleksei Sokolov, a campaigner against torture and other abuses in Russia’s prisons, imprisoned from May 2009 to July 2011 on charges widely believed to be fabricated.
While two people were convicted of the murder of Markelov and Baburova this year, the killers of Politkovskaya and Estemirova have yet to be brought to justice. These cases demonstrate Russia’s failure to live up to its domestic and international obligations to effectively investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of such crimes. Worse, the cases bring to the fore concerns that political authorities may themselves be complicit in the crimes.
In Politkovskaya’s case, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ordered a renewed investigation after three suspects were acquitted for lack of evidence in a jury trial in February 2009. In May this year Amnesty International welcomed the arrest of Rustam Makhmudov, a suspect in Politkovskaya’s killing, in Chechnya as “a major step toward justice.” But a second trial has yet to take place, and fears remain that the organizers of what many believe was a contract killing may never be prosecuted or punished.
In July 2011, on the eve of the second anniversary of the Estemirova killing, the Memorial Human Rights Center, jointly with the International Federation of Human Rights and the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta, published a report that castigated the official investigation for following a false track in seeking to blame insurgents for the killing when the circumstances of Estemirova’s death and the threats made against her indicated possible official complicity in her murder. Amnesty International, Civil Rights Defenders, Front Line Defenders, Human Rights Watch, and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee separately issued a joint statement calling on Russian authorities to conduct a thorough, impartial impartial, and transparent investigation and prosecute those responsible “regardless of rank or position.”
Sokolov, the human rights defender in detention from May 2009 until July of this year, was convicted in May 2010 at an unfair trial on theft and robbery charges that observers believe were fabricated in order to punish him for his work in exposing torture in prisons. Sentenced to five years (later reduced to three years), Sokolov served his sentence 2,000 kilometers from his home. Reports say that he was beaten and that he went on hunger strike while in detention.
Courts manipulated
Russian courts’ lack of independence, along with widespread manipulation of the justice system by individuals in authority, has been exemplified for a global audience by the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who worked for the Hermitage Capital investment fund. Russian officials accused Hermitage Capital of tax evasion, but its CEO William Browder believed government officials had used his company to carry out a largescale tax fraud.
Magnitsky was arrested after he accused Russian officials of fraud, and was thereafter charged with helping Hermitage Capital commit tax evasion. He died in 2009 after being held for 11 months in pretrial detention.
While he was in prison, Magnitsky was denied adequate medical care and, according to a recent report, was severely beaten by prison guards shortly before he died. Government prosecutors have since charged two prison doctors with negligence in connection with his death. No other charges have been brought.
But the most notorious case of political manipulation of the Russian justice system remains that of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, two former oil company executives imprisoned since 2003 on charges of embezzlement and money laundering. In May 2011, Amnesty International recognized the two men as prisoners of conscience, pointing to serious procedural violations and political motivations that have marred the criminal proceedings against them. In July, Lebedev’s application for parole was turned down. The two men’s terms in prison are now set to expire in 2016.
Tightening the net
Abuses of the justice system such as these take place against a background of systematic curtailment of civil and political rights by the Russian authorities. For example, burdensome regulations and selective application restrict people’s right to association. Notable in this regard are a 2006 law covering nongovernmental organizations and loosely worded anti-extremism legislation first passed in 2002.
The right of assembly is circumscribed, with demonstrations banned (as in the case of gay pride parades) or broken up, and with participants regularly detained and beaten by police—despite a campaign by human rights defenders in support of Article 31 of the Russian constitution, which guarantees the right of assembly. A 2001 law on political parties (amended in 2004, 2005, and 2009) is used to close down opposition groupings; the Justice Ministry, for instance, has banned the Republican Party, The Other Russia, and the People’s Freedom Party.
The government has restricted media rights, and violence against media workers has burgeoned. The high-profile killings of Politkovskaya and Baburova and the brutal assaults on journalists Mikhail Beketov (2008) and Oleg Kashin (2010) are but the tip of an iceberg. This year the Russian Union of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists in a joint report judged that in 2010 the practice of murdering journalists seemed to have given way to savage beatings.
The internet has also come under increasingly tight control in Russia—in the year of the Arab Spring it is perhaps natural for an authoritarian regime to view the internet as a challenge. A leading official of the Federal Security Service (FSB) this April called for Skype, Gmail, and Hotmail to be banned as threats to national security; in July Aleksandr Bortnikov, the FSB’s director, complained that the internet lured people into extremism.
In any case, commentators point out that “Runet” is already far from free. An April report by the international monitoring organization Freedom House ranked Russia 22nd out of 37 countries in terms of internet freedom. A June report by the Agora Association, a human rights group, identified 23 incidents of restricted internet access and persecution of internet users in the first five months of 2011. LiveJournal, the main platform for Russia’s blogging community, as well as Novaya Gazeta, have suffered major denial-of-service attacks that observers believe could not have been staged without government resources.
A test of will
Russia’s historic entry into the Council of Europe (1996) and its ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights (1998) gave Russian citizens the right to appeal cases directly to the European Court of Human Rights. This court has rendered definitive judgments pinpointing an array of significant human rights violations in Russia: that banning gay pride parades violates the right of assembly; that dissolution of the Republican Party violated the right of association; that in Chechnya, Russia had been responsible for disappearances, torture, and killing; that the right to a fair trial had been violated in cases such as that of the former arms control researcher Igor Sutyagin (sentenced for spying).
These judgments by the European court provide a simple means of testing the political will of the Russian leadership regarding human rights protection. As emphasized by Thomas Hammarberg, the human rights commissioner of the Council of Europe, member states must ensure a prompt, full, and effective execution of the court’s judgments.
Indeed, not to implement the court’s judgments in full constitutes a violation of Russia’s international obligations under Article 46 of the European Convention on Human Rights, according to which states “undertake to abide by the final judgment of the court in any case to which they are parties.” A lack of political will to protect human rights is in itself a breach of Moscow’s international obligations.
If Russia’s leaders are putting themselves above the law, it could be said they are showing allegiance to an older, Soviet tradition of politics. This tradition, against which the founders of the Moscow Helsinki Group were protesting when they gathered in Sakharov’s apartment back in 1976, is founded on a gulf between civil society and the state. Challenged at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s, this divide survived to take on a new life under the Putin regime.
For human rights and the rule of law to be firmly established in the Russian Federation there has to be what might best be called a “revolution of the spirit,” based on a new community of understanding among elites and the general public that the old divide must be overcome.
This revolution of the spirit would entail a genuine and shared commitment to observe human rights and to honor and protect human rights defenders. The Russian justice system would have to be firm in its independence. The government would need to take action to protect citizens’ rights, not curtail them, especially in key areas such as the rights of assembly, association, and free speech. And the nation’s leaders would have to find the political will to abide by their international human rights obligations.
A number of elements could come together to bring about this scenario: a reformist political leadership; responsible civil society movements strong enough to be reckoned with; a democratically oriented nation-building ethos able to overcome social and political divisions; an informed and influential public no longer willing to tolerate irrational authoritarianism; growth in the economic importance of a middle class of entrepreneurs not dependent on the oil and gas industries; and the positive influence of free communication with citizens and governments of other countries, not least those in the West.
Passing the torch
What is certain is that without an indigenous community of activists dedicated to the defense of human rights, none of this will happen. Indeed, Russian history has shown the world the importance of an activist community able, even in Soviet times, to keep the flame of human rights alive.
For this reason the older generation of Russia’s rights defenders and the qualities that they personified — clarity of purpose, fortitude, endurance, and compassion among them — will continue to serve as a model both for the younger generation of activists living and working in Russia today, and for people the world over who are concerned about protecting fundamental rights in the face of governments intent on denying such rights.
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posted 27 Sep 2011 07:39 by Rights in Russia
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updated 30 Sep 2011 02:04
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by Masha Karp
25 September 2011
Russia beyond Moscow and sometimes St Petersburg usually remains unknown to outsiders. Yet, recent attacks on the opposition in Yekaterinburg have attracted the attention of some western publications, including The Spectator and Opendemocracy. Over the past two weeks a series of pickets have been held outside the Russian embassy in London. The aim of the pickets has been to support Maxim Petlin, a local activist detained in a pre-trial detention centre since 26th August on fabricated charges. For more than a year now Londoners have been demonstrating in front of the Russian Embassy to show their solidarity with the Russian civic movement Strategy-31, whose rallies for freedom of assembly have been brutally suppressed in many Russian cities.
Paradoxically, rallies in Yekaterinburg have been allowed to go ahead peacefully. It is only recently that the local Strategy-31 organisers have been directly attacked by the authorities.
Maxim Petlin’s recent appeal to be granted bail has been refused and he continues to be held in a pre-trial detention centre. And what this is like is now widely known, thanks to the detailed descriptions left by Sergei Magnitsky of his detention…
Demonstrating in support of Maxim Petlin outside the Russian embassy, London, 23 September 2011
The next demonstration in support of Maxim Petlin will take place outside the Russian embassy on 30 September 2011 at 3pm.
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posted 21 Mar 2011 08:35 by Rights in Russia
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updated 22 Mar 2011 10:18
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21 March 2011
By Masha Karp
On Monday 7th March Queen Mary’s College of London University and the EU-Russia Centre jointly held a roundtable 'Are the media free in Russia today?' The panel was chaired by John Lloyd, contributing editor at the Financial Times and former Moscow Bureau Chief, and included Maria Lipman, editor-in-chief of Pro et Contra (Carnegie Moscow Center) and regular op-ed contributor to The Washington Post; Georgy Bovt, independent journalist, former executive editor-in-chief at Izvestia; and Luke Harding, former Guardian reporter in Russia. Masha Karp reports:
After a decade of numerous attacks on Russian journalists and firm state control of the main television channels, the question posed for the debate at Queen Mary’s College might seem strangely dated and rhetorical, but the presence on the panel of Luke Harding, a former Guardian Moscow correspondent who recently had to leave Russia, suddenly gave it a new dimension: “Are the foreign media free in Russia today?” Luke Harding’s fate certainly did not allow this question to be dismissed lightly.
Over the first weekend of February Luke Harding was detained at Domodedovo airport on his return to Moscow following an absence of two months. After nervously checking his passport, the young woman at passport control asked him to wait. He was soon taken to an airport cell, where other foreigners, also presumably ‘undesirable’, from Tajikistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo were being kept. He spent 45 minutes there, after which he was told: ‘Russia is closed for you’ and sent back to the UK on the first available plane. Conjectures as to why this could have happened ranged from Harding’s recent WikiLeaks coverage, which implied that the Russian government ‘was using the mafia for its dirty work’ or that Putin must have known about the planned 2006 assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London, to the journalist’s own brief detention in Ingushetia in April 2010, or his interview with the father of Mariam Sharipova, a suspected suicide bomber behind the blasts in Moscow in March 2010.
The fact that no official explanation was given at that point in itself worked as a powerful tool of intimidation: there are certain themes which a reporter should not touch, and certain places which he or she should not visit, or else you could be deported, just like the too-inquisitive Guardian journalist. In fact, as Luke Harding told the audience at Queen Mary’s, even without this latest warning, not only Russian journalists, but foreign journalists in Russia more often than not exercise self-censorship when it comes to the most sensitive issues. As there is very little reliable official information, Western correspondents, who are used to presenting two sides of the argument, are usually reluctant to deal with cases where an anti-government allegation cannot be juxtaposed against an official comment. They would rather avoid the particular topic altogether, thus depriving their readers, listeners and viewers at home of vital information.
Luke Harding was different from the start. And the consequences were immediate too. He told the audience at Queen Mary’s that it was within four months of his arrival in Moscow in 2007 that he realized ‘how unpopular he was’ with the authorities. This was unambiguously made clear to him by a variety of means. And within 4 years he was expelled from the country.
There was of course one thing that slightly spoilt the triumph of the authorities who sanctioned his expulsion – they had to row back on it. While the Russian media was accusing Harding of ‘ over-blowing a scandal’ and predicting that making a meal out of it would only make things worse, the row reached the British Parliament and, unusually, it was united in its protest. The Foreign Secretary William Hague called his counterpart in Russia Sergei Lavrov demanding an explanation, which Lavrov could not immediately provide, and during the debate in the House of Commons both the government Minister for Europe David Lidington and other MPs across the House expressed their indignation at Russia’s behaviour. As this was happening on the eve of Lavrov’s visit to Britain, Labour MP Chris Bryant, head of the All-Party Group on Russia, suggested that Lavrov be made to feel ‘not welcome in this country while British journalists are not welcome in Russia.’ This rare open display of the British position did the trick – the next day the Ministry of Foreign Affairs clumsily explained that the visa had only been suspended following Harding’s failure to collect his accreditation before he left for Britain and he could now go back to Russia. The words ‘Russia is closed for you’ seem to have been forgotten. This U-turn naturally strengthens the position of those who think that a firm approach by the West is still able to stop Russia’s authorities from going over the top, no matter how much they would hate it. Interestingly, two other speakers on the panel at Queen Mary’s College, Maria Lipman and Georgy Bovt, seemed to be trying to comfort the Western audience by saying that actually the situation with Russian media freedom is not as desperate as it may seem from afar. Of course, television, the main media for the majority of the Russian population, is fully controlled by the government, but some newspapers are free. And there is the Internet, which 30-40 million people now use regularly, even if only 2,000 out of 5 million bloggers write on politics. Of course, the press has no hope of influencing any decisions taken by the authorities, which effectively means that there is no freedom of the press in Russia, but there is freedom of self-expression and ‘we certainly do not need any “foreign voices” (foreign radio stations) supplying us with information, as it was in the past, because those who wish to get it will know how to find it, even in the absence of media freedom.’ This seems to have been the message from the Russian members of the panel. ‘How well is the Russian public acquainted with the Sergei Magnitsky affair?’ was one of the questions asked after the debate. Georgy Bovt thought that under 5% of Russians would know what it was all about, Maria Lipman’s estimate was about 15%. The problem, however, is that although the majority of the British public have surely not made any special effort to find information about Magnitsky, his tragic fate has become known to them thanks to the free media Britain has, rather than as a result of individual decisions to search for it. The acceptance of a two-tier system, when only those who are politically aware have access to information (because they know where to find it), while others have no idea that this information exists, can hardly be called particularly democratic. The panel’s attitude to the West also seemed to be ambiguous. Georgy Bovt suggested that if young Russian people regularly travelled abroad – even just to have a beer in Prague – the situation in Russia could change relatively quickly. However, when out of a population of 140 million only 12 million have foreign passports, and only five million of these actually travel, there is no certainty that this would necessarily work… Maria Lipman’s emphasis was on trying to talk the West out of any attempts to influence the situation in Russia: ‘You don’t have any leverage,’ she said. However, Luke Harding mentioned a tool that could prove useful in the fight against corrupt and criminal officials - the refusal to grant them visas to Europe and America, as proposed by the American senator Benjamin Cardin and supported by the U.S Congress and the European Parliament. And another thing was gradually becoming obvious – if the influence of the West were minimal, if it had no leverage whatsoever, why would the Russian authorities have tried to expel a reporter whose main ‘offence’ was to tell too much to his English-speaking readers? Why would have they been so annoyed if this did not matter at all? |
posted 13 Jan 2011 01:08 by Rights in Russia
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updated 8 Mar 2011 06:16
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Masha Karp
An interview with Igor Sutyagin
Masha Karp I started talking with Igor Sutyagin about the Russian penal system at the recent BEARR Trust annual conference on “Young People in Trouble” held in London on 19 November 2010. One of the questions to which the conference was devoted was the fate of young people who fall foul of the law. The reasons for juvenile crime, the treatment of young offenders, and attempts to introduce juvenile justice and non-custodial sentences were discussed in presentations by Mary McAuley, Boris Altshuler, Yuliana Nikitina and Tsira Chanturia. Naturally all the speakers insisted that young offenders should be treated differently from adults in the justice system, and should be kept in separate institutions. It was at this point that Igor Sutyagin, who spent over ten and a half years in Russian penal colonies, joined the discussion. Drawing on his own experience he surprised the audience by saying that keeping young offenders separately from others might prove more harmful than useful for them. So I started our interview with asking him what made him think so.
Igor Sutyagin We should be absolutely clear what young people we are talking about. Under current Russian law, children and teenagers under 18 are kept in penal colonies completely separate from those places where adults are kept, and I am certainly not going to argue against this. But if we are talking, say, about a 19-year-old, who has committed a crime and is going to be kept only with people of his own age, I have my objections. These youngsters after all are still children inside their heads. They haven’t yet had any real experience of life. I would even say they still have a kind of childish - rather than youthful - maximalism and they simply don’t realize that life is a more complicated thing than it seems to them to be, even life in prison. Young people like that in a group are like a pack of young wolves. They haven’t understood anything about life and they begin to grow up like wolves. They have not yet realized that you have to love people, that people need to support each other, that in prison you can’t simply harass people or treat them like dirt…The presence of more experienced, more seasoned, wiser people – people who have experience not only of prison, but of life outside - exerts a very positive influence on the general atmosphere and the education of these young people, pushing them in a better – more humane – direction. MK At the conference you said that socialization was also of extreme importance for young offenders. What exactly did you mean? Igor Sutyagin If these children are kept away from a social milieu where there are people of different ages living together, they will not have even the faintest idea of what society is and how one adapts to it. The prison terms to which people are sentenced are sometimes simply beyond belief. At the Pirsy penal colony in Arkhangelsk I knew a young man who had been sentenced to 22 years in prison at the age of 19. MK What for? Igor Sutyagin For murder. But in any case just imagine he will start growing up among other people like himself… Who will he become? In any case, people who have spent a long time in prison, even elderly people, people over forty, develop a very infantile way of thinking. And if these are not adults who have evolved as personalities in the course of time, but just green youngsters who were children only yesterday? And they have no chance to socialize with adults on a daily basis? Prison managers after all do not matter much in cases like these. They are appointed as educators, but in real life they do not do anything to educate these youngsters. They are like shepherds: they are there, but at the same time separate from the herd. So if there is nobody around who is slightly older, slightly more intelligent, those who came to prison as youngsters will forever remain wolf cubs, only with grey hair! These young people, yesterday’s children, are often simply not aware what pain is. Life among the young is extraordinarily cruel. In Kaluga remand prison an old, old prisoner, called Chaikovsky, once overheard a young boy talking, who, after he had turned 18, was “moved up”, as they call it in prison, from “children’s” cells to a common cell. Chaikovsky was fifty years old, and of these 50 years he had spent about 27 in prison. He interrupted our conversation (I had been trying to explain something to him concerning his criminal case), turned to this boy and asked him: “What was it you were telling the others just now?” The boy said: “I’ve been telling them about the rules we have in our cells in the fifth wing”. And Chaikovsky replied: “I’ve served so many terms and have never heard of anything so horrible!” This milieu which, in a childish way, lacks any compassion, can simply kill: first, psychologically, then even physically. So in the first place it’s simply dangerous. As there are no real educators or teachers (I do not mean what may exist on paper), the only people who are involved in any sense in educating the youngsters in prison are simply those adults who surround them. The real hard-core criminals constitute not more than 30 per cent of the prison population. The rest, on the whole, are ordinary people. If these people are not around, who will teach the young ones? MK Let’s talk about socialization now. As you have already said, a term in prison does not prepare people, young or old, for a life at liberty. Is there anything that can be done about this? Igor Sutyagin Given the system that we have, I don’t think there is anything at all that can be done. Because on the one hand, this is a system of universal paternalism. And on the other hand, it’s a system of universal parasitism. I am talking about the management of the penal colonies, and the authorities in general. On the one hand, prisoners are free from any need to organize their own life – food, clothing – only some little things. You can fuss around to get yourself a better cap or a more fashionable quilted jacket, or some fancy trousers or shoes – but all this is not really necessary, because in any case you will be given something to eat, and, in any case, even if you do nothing at all, you will be given some clothes or other, and you will be put to bed. Nothing depends on you. This is how infantilism develops –there is no responsibility for what you do. Infantilism of the inmates is, so to speak, a consequence of the paternalism of the authorities. People get out of the habit of taking any decisions. They can get out of the habit to such an extent that they can work themselves up into a serious panic during the last months before release. A couple of my close friends had not served very long terms. In the two cases I am thinking about now, the prison term was only eight years, which is not so long for Russia nowadays. Both men panicked profoundly. One of them, a grown–up man of forty-four doing his second term of imprisonment, developed a fever of 39 during the last six weeks in the colony. He was not ill. The prison word for it is “racing”. He was “racing” so much, he was just was afraid of being released. He did not know what to expect outside. And this psychological reaction had a physical effect on him. Another good friend of mine who weighed 52 kilos lost 16 kilos in the final month before his release. He was also sent to the hospital. He had fainting fits. And this was after 8 years in prison. Just imagine if you’ve been in prison for 27 years! People forget how to live, they are afraid of life, so what kind of socialization can we talk about so far as prison is concerned…. MK What should be done then? Igor Sutyagin We should certainly stop people being locked up in prison cells and deprived of human contact any more than they are now. The idea of holding people in cells in prisons will lead to people forgetting even how freedom looks. As it is, one can at least look out at the village on the other side of the fence. If people are deprived of this, they will be completely lost for society, they will become completely asocial, unused to society, and end up outside society like so many Robinson Crusoes… MK But isn’t the idea of having fewer camps and more prisons becoming more popular in Russia? Igor Sutyagin The official proposal is to get rid of camps altogether and introduce a five-tier system - two types of ‘colony-cum-settlement’ and three types of prison. MK Those who propose this system, do they think it is more liberal? Why is it being put forward? Igor Sutyagin Frankly speaking, I have a feeling that this is yet another example of our ambiguous relationship with America. Official anti-Americanism covers a love-hate relationship, and that’s why we slavishly imitate American experience on our soil. In America there are no penal colonies, only prisons. And this is what we are copying. But so far as I know the difference between the proposal and how it is really done in America is tremendous. And so far as the question of socialization is concerned, what is being proposed looks extremely dangerous. The following five types of institutions are being proposed: 'Colonies-cum-settlements' - ordinary regime and milder regime. A milder-regime colony-cum-settlement means, according to the plan, a free life where you are only required to come back to the building of the colony-cum-settlement for the night. Of course, you are only allowed out to the local community where your colony-cum-settlement is located. You cannot go freely wherever you want, but only to the community where you are registered. But you are free to leave whenever you want. Prisoners of this kind are supposed to work outside the colony-cum-settlement. This happened in the past too. I remember prisoners from our strict-regime penal colony in Sarapul were employed making pavements in town, making paving stones or doing building work, or whatever. Under the proposal, in these colonies you would go to work without escort guards. This would be a mild regime. The ordinary regime stipulates that a prisoner may leave the colony to go to the local community settlement only with the permission of the prison administration. This corresponds to the present system of colony-cum-settlements where you work under supervision of escort guards and are allowed to leave the colony as a reward only. The proposal makes provisions for three types of prisons: ordinary regime, strict regime and prisons for those sentenced to life imprisonment. It seems that the situation is going to get even worse than it is now in penal colonies. What the announced proposal seems to mean is that common barracks which exist today will be rebuilt to turn them into cells. And in ordinary regime prisons, people will leave their cells to go to work – to the same industrial zone where they go now. But in the present colony you live in shared barracks and can go outside whenever you feel like it and have the free time to look around and breathe the air. At other times you go to work, which is located separately, beyond the fence. The new situation will correspond to the one that is presently called “SHIZO plus work”, that is, you are kept in a cell, but taken to work. A SHIZO is a punishment cell, it’s used for punishment…So if this is “liberalization” then call me the Pope! But this is not all. Under the proposal put forward by the Ministry of Justice, work in strict regime prisons and in prisons for lifers, rather than just being not provided, would be prohibited! Their idea of reform implies that additional pressure would be put on prisoners by forbidding them to work. MK What will they do then? Igor Sutyagin Nothing. Stay in their cells. MK Is it done this way in America or is it their own invention? Igor Sutyagin I am not sure how things are in America, but I don’t think it can simply be like that. However the thrust of the proposals announced and published in Rossiiskaya gazeta is that some of those convicted will be forbidden to work. So people would be literally locked up in stone boxes without any hope of ever leaving them. With custodial sentences of 27 years, who will leave those cells? Beasts! Not because they are going to become very wicked, but because they will stop being human. Is this the idea behind the proposed reform? According to the proposals, this new system will affect at least 300,000 people. Out of 760,000 people who are nowadays deprived of their liberty, at least 300,000 will have to be moved to prison. This is really serious. It gets even more serious if we remember that among them will be people who have not been sentenced to terms in prison. In other words, our constitutional principle that ‘a law establishing or aggravating responsibility shall not have retroactive force’ will be ignored for the umpteenth time. I don’t really know what’s left of our Constitution, but this principle is going to be ignored and will affect 300,000 people even without the involvement of the Basmanny court. Under the current legal system a person can be sentenced to a term in prison, as opposed to a penal colony, only by decision of a court. For example, to make a sentence harsher, the judge can write – “will be punished by a custodial sentence of 19 years of which, say, the first five years must be spent in prison.” This is when a convicted person is sent to prison. This implies additional limitations on seeing family or receiving parcels… Another possibility is when a person has seriously violated the regime prescribed in a colony, they can be transferred from the colony to a prison as punishment, which would be ordered by a court decision. Such a decision would be issued at a special hearing of the court responsible for the region where the colony is located. The term of imprisonment in such cases cannot exceed three years. And still this punishment is only issued by a special decision of a court. And the new proposal just takes 300,000 people who have not been given prison sentences, who have not broken any regime, and at a stroke sends them to prison. And the way they are planning to make this transfer! Take someone for whom, as they say, “End of term – Never!” That is to say, for example, until 2032. Someone who has been sentenced to serve another 22 years in a penal colony where at least he can sometimes go out to look at the stars. And now he has been moved to a prison where he will spend the next 22 years in a cell! Do you realize what is being done? In the past for some incredibly horrible violation one could get sent to prison, by special court decision, for a maximum of just three years. And now it is such an easy matter! No violations, no court decisions, just 22 years! If this is the rule of law, call me a soloist at the Bolshoi Theatre! MK They think they are improving the situation… Igor Sutyagin Of course, of course, officially that is how it is: an improvement. What really shocks me is that this reform is not being discussed. I have recently come across one article about it in the Russian electronic media. And thank God for that! But before that…even human rights activists who had spent time in prison were keeping mum. Have they forgotten what a prison is, and the difference between a prison and a colony? I am completely shocked. MK But do you think any changes for the better are possible in the Russian penal system or is everything going in the opposite direction? Igor Sutyagin Naturally one always likes to hope for changes for the better. Still I do not think it is very likely that, given what is happening in the country as a whole, things would move in a different direction n the penal system. At the moment we are witnessing a crackdown. This is happening yet again because the prison authorities are at a loss what to do. The present situation where release on parole has practically been abolished has resulted in a loss of control over the colonies. You cannot rule by the stick alone. If you use the whip all the time the skin gets tough and nobody pays any attention to it anymore. You need a carrot. MK And when was parole abolished?
Igor Sutyagin In practice this has been going on since 2005. The system has started to fall to pieces…In the penal colonies, at least in Arkhangelsk, they used to have exhibition stands showing the number of those released on parole. In about 2005 the numbers started to plunge and in 2009 they stopped putting up the stand altogether. Earlier they used to put monthly figures on display. One month 50 people were released on parole, the next month 37, the next, 20, and the next, let’s say, 70. But when in a colony for 1,500 people only seven were released on parole during a whole year, it stopped making sense to publish monthly figures. It looked like a disgrace. So they just wrote the surnames of these 7 people who had been released on parole…
And in my first colony, in the Yagul settlement in Udmurtia, there was a stand with beautiful, bright, colour photos under the heading, “They Have Been Released on Parole”. There were 9 photos there and the period they covered was three years. And the colony was of the same size – 1,500 people.
This absence of hope (since somebody has been released earlier, I might too…) brings very sad results. Here is the case of that same 19-year-old I mentioned earlier. During the time I knew him he reached the age of 23. Once he was standing in formation at roll-call and a Head of Unit (not ours, another one) rebuked him for having stripes on his tracksuit trousers, because it was forbidden. And he told him to go and change, saying that if somebody from higher management came, he might regret it.
In response the lad exploded and told him: “What will you do to me? I am standing here in these trousers and what can you do to me? Send me to a punishment cell? Deprive me of parole? I am not afraid of the punishment cell - I’ve been there. And I won’t be released on parole anyway! If you like I’ll spit at you right now! If you write another report I will be sent to the punishment cell yet again. What else can you do to me?”
In this kind of situation, punishment ceases to work, and the authorities can only maintain order if the prisoners themselves are ready to comply. If there is nothing to lose, what can you lose? Even a punishment cell is not so bad. At least you don’t have to stand in the cold five times a day for the roll-calls. You just sit in your cell taking a rest. What can scare you? This is what makes colonies uncontrollable. A carrot is needed, but at the moment nobody wants to give this carrot, because the general tendency is in the other direction. They are just trying to beat even harder with the stick…And what will come of that? People get tired of being afraid.
That is why I am rather skeptical of the idea that there are going to be any significant changes for the better any time soon.
11 January 2011Igor Sutyagin will be talking, together with Martin Dewhirst, about the possibility of reform in the Russian penal system in London at Pushkin House on 18th January 2011. | |
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