The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday condemned Russia for having isolated and handcuffed for a long time a prisoner sentenced to life and called on Moscow to act against this systemic problem.
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The ECHR had been seized by a detainee who denounced the regime to which he had been subjected for more than seven years in a penal colony in the Russian Far East. Imprisoned alone or with another detainee, he had to stay 22 and a half hours a day in his cell, without working or having access to any educational activity, and for the first five years was handcuffed as soon as he went out. He was even handcuffed when he had to empty a 30-liter bucket in a septic tank outside the building, which did not have an evacuation system. During his entire stay in this penal colony, he had never violated the rules.
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The ECHR has ruled that these conditions of detention constitute inhuman and degrading treatment, prohibited by the European Convention on Human Rights, and ordered Russia to pay 3,000 euros for non-pecuniary damage to this detainee. More broadly, it notes that the strict imprisonment regime applied in Russia to persons sentenced to life imprisonment during the first 10 years of their detention, without taking into account the dangerousness of each, constitutes a " systemic problem " and calls on Moscow to solve it.
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" The Court has already established that all forms of isolation risk, in the long term, of having harmful effects and of degrading the mental and relational faculties " of the detainees, she pointed out in a press release. " Detention in double cells in such conditions of isolation or for a prolonged period can therefore only be justified by specific security reasons ". The ECHR suggests that Russia assess the risks posed by each detainee, put in place the strict prison regime only on this basis and mitigate certain aspects of this regime, primarily those affecting the isolation of convicts in perpetuity and their access to reintegration activities.
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