Unlike Belarus, where a mild liberalization is said to be in progress, the Russian regime is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
Until recently, there have been reports that Moscow was following the example of Minsk in the field of human rights issues. However, while Alyaksandr Lukashenka was releasing political prisoners, they appeared in Russia. According to human rights activists, there is about a hundred of them in Russia. How easy is to turn into a political prisoner in the country ruled by Vladimir Putin?
Ildar Dadin became the first political prisoners in Russia, who was sentenced under the amendments to the Criminal Code which had been approved by the Russian State Duma after the annexation of Crimea. According to the amendments, anyone may end up prison for participating in unsanctioned rallies and actions organized by the opposition. This happened to Ildar Dadin, regardless of the fact that he held one-man pickets.
“Ildar Dadin is serving the term for one-man pickets, but he was sentenced for… participating in mass actions. But in his case, neither mass actions nor violations took place! Protocols were fabricated by the police: they witnessed that some people had accompanied Ildar,” Russian journalist and Ildar Dadin’s wife Anastasia Zotova states.
In early November, Dadin revealed his being beaten and tortured in prison Nr 7 in Karelia, where he had been sent to serve after the sentence. After the case was made public, the prison director was fired and even Putin turned his attention to the case. But the presidential inspection did not discover anything.
“There are cases of torturing prisoners in Karelia, Kemerovo, Sverdlovsk, Irkutsk, Chelyabinsk regions,” Anastasia Zotova says.
Recently, the European Parliament adopted a resolution in which it called for the immediate release of Dadin and carrying out an independent investigation into the cases of torture in prisons; the United States also urged the Russian leadership to do so. Maybe that is the reason why Dadin was transferred to another colony. But what about the others?
According to estimations by Russian human rights watchdog Memorial, there is about a hundred political prisoners in Russia, i.e. protesters in Bolotnaya Square, Ukrainians detained in Crimea, etc. Almost half of them are now in Russian prisons; other measures of restraint of liberty are being taken against the rest of them.
“It is not difficult to become a political prisoner in Russia. The Bolotnaya Square case, which bears a strong resemblance to post-election mass arrests in 2010 in Belarus, is a clear proof of it. There are prisoners among nationalists, communists, the Left (e.g. Sergei Udaltsov). They put very different people in jails. Knowing that people were tried for sharing photos on Vkontakte social network and the SMS about the conflict in Georgia sent in 2008, one can suggest that the number of political prisoners in Russia is underestimated,” Belarusian blogger and former political prisoner Eduard Palchys believes.
At the moment, Belarus has one political prisoner, Belarusian HRC Viasna reports. His name is Mikhail Zhamchuzhny, a scientist from Vitsebsk, who are behind bars for allegedly disclosing secret information. Human rights activist Andrey Bandarenka was convicted for malicious hooliganism in 2014. But world-known influential human rights organizations such as Amnesty International believe that by contrast with Russia, there are no prisoners of conscience in Belarus.
Belsat.eu
