According to the newly passed package of laws on the judicial system, in the immediate future all pretrial detention cells and all issues connected with those imprisoned in them will be under the control of the judicial organs. However, one should not hope that the conditions of maintaining the prisoners will significantly improve immediately. As Chairman of the Supreme Council of Justice of Ukraine Serhiy Kyvalov noted the week before last, today the judicial organs receive only 40% of the financing they need. Moreover, as expert of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights Gerald Staberock said, it is not enough to include the necessary provisions in legislation; it is necessary to control their implementation. “We are used to believing that we are the society, while prisons, pretrial imprisonment cells, etc., are not a part of it, but this is not true. They are also a part of society, and we should try to actively influence the processes going on there,” Mr. Staberock also stated. However, nobody is guaranteed against winding up in prison or ending up with beggar’s bag, as our old saying goes, especially taking into consideration the imperfect nature of our judicial system.
Meanwhile, insults, beating, forcible homosexual contacts with both cellmates and guards — this is a far from being complete list of humiliations the prisoners suffer in Ukrainian penitentiaries. Ukrainian ombudsmen Nina Karpachova spoke about this at a recent press conference, noting that in Ukraine, which, incidentally, has joined the UN Convention against Torture, the prisoners often have to go through nightmares which a normal person cannot comprehend.
In addition, Ms. Karpachova stated that Ukrainian jails and investigative isolation cells are overcrowded, and this is one of the reasons why one could only dream about normal maintaining conditions there. According to the ombudsman’s data, while there are about two million imprisoned in all the EU countries, in Ukraine their number is about 227,000. The other reason for the overburdening of our penitentiaries is that quite often our courts overuse pretrial incarceration in cases where a written undertaking not to leave or bail would be sufficient. At the same time, half of those “criminals” are guilty of only stealing a loaf of bread or a couple of geese. In Ms. Karpachova’s words, it is mostly people whose guilt had not yet been proved by the court who suffer from humiliation and torture. Thus for many people recognizing themselves guilty for, perhaps, somebody else’s crime is a saving remedy to get to the zone, “which after being in pretrial detention or an investigative isolator looks like a spa for these people,” Ms. Karpachova noted.
An especially difficult situation has arise: at the Kryvy Rih investigative isolator No. 4, where imprisoned women, as evidenced by Nina Karpachova and former prisoner Liubov Zhuravska, are made to stay on their feet or squat and are not allowed even to go to the bathroom. However, it is hard to prove the facts of humiliation and tortures. As Ms. Karpachova told The Day, this can be done only if there are some witnesses ready to present their evidence in court. Nevertheless, without a normal legal basis and witness protection program it will be truly difficult to find such people. The situation can be slightly improved by implementing the new Criminal Code of Ukraine on September 1, containing a completely new chapter providing criminal responsibility for brutality toward the incarcerated.
COMMENT
Oleksandr BUKALOV, Chairman of the Council of the Donetsk Memorial Civil Organization to Protect Human Rights:
Despite the topic of penitentia ries, their inmates, and severe conditions of their maintenance being discussed in the media quite often, still some old stereotypes remain in society. Particularly, there is a widespread opinion that even if prisoners are hard pressed in custody, they deserve it. Punishment is almost identified with revenge for crimes committed, and the sufferings of the prisoners are perceived as not tortures but the inevitable and just punishment for their crimes. However, there are people imprisoned in the pretrial imprisonment cells, for whom the court had not made its final decision yet. You can frequently hear from a person who was imprisoned in a pretrial incarceration cell that his being there was a chain of humiliations. Much was said about overloading the investigative insulators as a reason for their hard living conditions. Maintaining the prisoners, their food and medical treatment are financed by the state. And if money assigned for this purposes is several times less than necessary, it is impossible to ensure normal life conditions for the imprisoned. Thus the problem of bad conditions exists, but it is not the prison staff that should be blamed for it. However, recently a tendency has been outlined for improving these conditions, but the process is moving too slowly, and we still have a way to go to meet European standards.
However, the question can be paraphrased: are prisoners beaten or tortured at our jails? The answer to this question must be based on facts. And it is hard to find reliable facts because of the specifics of this system. For us the most reliable source is the letters from prisoners, according to which intentional humiliating the prisoners in our colonies is not a mass phenomenon. There are many more petitions to our organization dealing with the militia tortures. If imprisoned people feel that they are humiliated and their rights violated, the source for such feelings are first of all their living conditions. Speaking about tortures in our penitentiaries, I believe it important that being taken into custody is itself a serious psychological trial. Different people react to it in different ways. I would suppose that often the psychological climate in the colony is more important than the level of the convenience. Causing moral sufferings by violence is also considered torture. And violence does not necessarily have to be physical. And it is much more difficult to register such violence. I cannot judge in what measure psychological and moral humiliation exists in our penal colonies. One can only guess that there are different situations, and, as a rule, they depend on the specific person, specific penal worker.
