Alexey Galkin. Photo: Youtube. Some rights reserved. If you try typing “torture in Russian prison colonies” into any Russian search engine, you immediately get a vast number of hits. They won’t just be video clips and articles describing violence, but a catalogue of “types” of torture published by glossy magazines. Just about anyone who lives in provincial Russia will tell you that prisoners are beaten up, and that this is “normal” — it’s always happened and always will. Physical abuse of inmates has been part of our reality for a long time, and it doesn’t bother anyone except human rights campaigners and, of course, the prisoners themselves.
The Torture Territory project, which helps prisoners combat illegal violence against them, has been going in Russia since December 2016. Together with the “For Human Rights” movement and the “Defence of Prisoners’ Rights Foundation” (which have had a much longer involvement in this field), we organise visits to prisons by lawyers. These are specialists with considerable experience who are able not only to assert their rights when dealing with prison administrators, but can tell whether there has indeed been mass violence against inmates in this or that jail, or it’s just an excuse for prisoners to get free legal advice.
If a lawyer believes that inmates’ complaints have a basis in reality, we write to the Investigative Committee, Russia’s main federal investigating authority, and the Prosecutor General’s Office, asking them to check the torture claims and penalise sadistic prison officers. We also continue to work with the lawyer, attempting to bring charges to courts at various levels.
