On April 10, 2014 Aleksey Sokolov and me went together to penal colony № 10 which is located in Yekaterinburg. The reason is members of Public Monitoring Committee while inspecting colony found two prisoners who came back from ward-type rooms of Ivdel penal colony № 63 on April 8th. Prisoners just arrived there, and already been incarcerated in ward-type rooms again.
We were surprised by this fact, all the more so earlier several convicts addressed to members of Public Monitoring Committee to help them out with legal consultations. The chief of this correctional facility is Sogomon Artushevich Varosyan, it was him who elevated life of this prison to higher standards.
The chief met us personally, didn’t make any difficulties, quite the opposite, he organized meetings with prisoners. Also he explained decision towards those prisoners who were transferred to ward-type rooms. As Sagomon Artushevich explained they refused to work on art.106 and he won’t let anyone break the rules in his colony. We went further .. to our surprise jailers offered us tea and coffee. We were pleasantly surprised.
Two convicts who are on «light» conditions of imprisonment, came up to speak to us, even if there was one convict on our list. Jailers asked if we didn’t mind to receive another one. We didn’t. We were glad to.
All questions were about criminal cases, complicated and high-profile, required help of attorneys. We explained that we cannot provide them with attorneys because it’s not often when attorneys deal with criminal cases for free.
But we got interested in one case in particular because investigation officers applied tortures towards convicts. According to prisoner, all full confessions were received by means of tortures as it was proved later (prisoners were taken to the forest, tortured with electric shocker, threatened by sexual violence).
All convicts were stated victims except one. It was logically, because otherwise accusation would be ruined.
He has been writing to authorities for many years but no results so far. It’s endless circle.
But we want to help them somehow,
We spoke to prisoners from ward-type rooms, everything is regular there, we will be monitoring the situation with them. Some relatives of them already addressed to our organization. No complaints of this colony but they would leave colony without regret.
Maybe we get it wrong.
Inspection was held as a part of project “Public service for penitentiary control in the Ural Federal district”. While executing the project means of state assistance are used allocated as grant according to Order of President of the Russian Federation on 18.09.2013 № 348-рп”) and based on competition of Donor”
Larisa Zakharova, member of Coordinators Council «Trans regional human rights’ center», Expert Fund «For defense of convicts’ rights».
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