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05.05.10
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Lethal Leverage
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By Tom Balmforth
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On Friday April 30 Vera Trifonova, the director of a real estate company, died of heart failure in the poorly equipped medical ward of Moscow region’s Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention center. Vladimir Zherebenkov, her lawyer, claims that medical treatment was held back as leverage to make his client confess.
Trifonova, a diabetic 53-year old with only one functioning kidney, who was also wheelchair-bound, had been in custody since December. She was charged with selling a seat in parliament, when her condition started to worsen sharply. After repeated requests for medical treatment, she was finally admitted to a Moscow City hospital where her condition stabilized and doctors recommended that she be transferred to better medical facilities. Nonetheless, a day later Sergei Pysin, an investigator, returned to the hospital and without even registering Trifonova’s condition produced a pre-prepared medical document confirming her readiness to return to the detention center, Zherebenkov told the Justice human rights group.
Consequently Trifonova’s appeal for bail on medical grounds was denied, and her detention extended. After subsequently being transferred to inadequately equipped facilities further out of town, including Mozhaysk prison 70 kilometers from Moscow, she was eventually brought back to Matrosskaya Tishina on April 29, where she died.
“They purposefully destroyed her and sent her to the Mozhaysk prison so that she would die there,” the Other Russia opposition Website quotes Zherebenkov as saying.
Sergei Pysin is now being charged with criminal negligence and yesterday the deputy head of Moscow’s Investigatory Committee was dismissed. President Dmitry Medvedev himself has called for a thorough investigation and appointed the Investigation Committee’s chairman to personally oversee an inquiry into the case. Past experience, however, shows that justice in these cases is rare.
“There were many complaints from human rights organizations and activists about the situation with Vera, but she was not moved to an appropriate establishment and wasn’t given appropriate treatment. I do not know why this was, but it can be called a kind of corruption,” said Victoria Sergeeva, the regional director of Penal Reform International (PRI).
“I think this case is very similar to the Magnitsky case. The situation is almost identical,” said Valery Sergeev, an analyst with the Moscow Center for Prison Reform.
Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who represented the Hermitage Capital investment fund, was held on charges of tax fraud for 11 months in connection with his work. When he died last November, it was after repeated requests for medical treatment went unanswered. Hermitage Capital has had enemies in Russia since it accused bureaucrats of theft from the state budget, allegations which Magnitsky provided witness statements to support. The multi-billion dollar investment fund has been targeted by corporate raiders, and William Browder, its co-founder, has been persona non grata in Russia since 2006.
After the Magnitsky case, which made news around the world, Medvedev passed a law allowing those charged with economic crimes to be released on bail so that imprisonment cannot be used as leverage over them, RIA Novosti reports. He also fired several prison officials, including the head of the Matrosskaya Tishina jail, and called for a thorough investigation, but no progress has been made.
“Not a single investigator or police officer responsible for Sergei's death has been implicated even 6 months after his death,” said a spokesman for Hermitage Capital who requested anonymity. “[None of those] whom he implicated in the theft of Russian budget money bore any responsibility whatsoever, just the opposite, some of them have been promoted.”
Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Foundation, told the New York Times last week that “our president has constitutional powers no emperor ever had. But did that help punish those who brought Magnitsky to his death? Nothing of the kind. All those people are still working in their positions.”
The failure of the investigation, which Browder predicted in an interview with Radio Free Europe back in November, has caught the attention of senior politicians in Washington who are urging the U.S. presidential administration to impose measures on those deemed responsible. “I urge you to immediately cancel and permanently withdraw the U.S visa privileges of all those involved in this crime, along with their dependents and family members,” a senior U.S. official wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week in an open letter, which names 60 Russian state officials.
But the Trifonova case shows the need to address the root problems. Although Magnitsky’s case may have brought Russia’s prisons back into the public eye, it hardly set the precedent. In other high-profile cases Vasily Aleksanyan, a fleeting YUKOS vice-president, was arrested in April 2006 in connection with the Mikhail Khordorkovsky case and was denied medical treatment in prison despite having been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. Requests were denied, he said, because he refused to implicate the former YUKOS executives, Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, in charges which critics consistently call politically motivated. Two and a half years later and only days before the European Court for Human Rights itself made demands, Alexsanyan was released on bail for treatment. Svetlana Bakhmina, another lawyer for YUKOS, was denied her right to parole after becoming pregnant in jail and was only released this time last year after Medvedev himself intervened when a petition was signed by 90,000 people.
More recently, on April 19, Valery Kulish, who is serving a 12-year sentence in a Moscow jail, appealed to viewers in a video posted on YouTube, in which he compares his plight to Magnitsky’s. An investigation is now being carried out on how he managed to make the film in jail.
Sergeeva said that around 4,000 died in Russia’s 1,135 penitentiary centers overall last year. After Magnitsky’s death, Alexander Raimet, the head of the Federal Prison Services, speaking on the Echo of Moscow radio station, last December said that 386 had died in pretrial detention in the first 11 months of 2009, which was an increase on the same period in 2008.
Russia’s outdated prisons have long been in need of reform. PRI highlights several specific challenges in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus: “violence in places of detention, poor living conditions and treatment of detainees, as well as a lack of public oversight of detention facilities remain widespread.”
But while Russia is undoubtedly in need of prison reform, Trifonova’s death also simply reflects wider corruption in the country, said Sergeeva.
And Sergeev agreed, pointing out that Moscow jailers had themselves filed for a review of Trifonova’s detention on health grounds on March 25 and April 9. “This means that it is the court that is responsible, so solving this problem is not a question of reform,” said Valery Sergeev, reluctant to simply point the finger of guilt at one particular branch of law enforcement.
“To no extent do I want to divide up the system which deals with crime - they all help each other. The whole law enforcement system, including the Prosecutor General’s Office, they all keep in touch – it’s a single community, one circle,” he said. “So in order to really reform it is necessary to separate the interaction and links between these structures so that they are further away from each other. But this isn’t possible in Russia – the mentality of Russians is that they approach the workplace like their own home,” said Sergeev.
“Unfortunately we can expect more cases like this one,” he concluded. |
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