UN Commitee to consider human rights situation in Chechnya

GENEVA, October 20 (RIA Novosti correspondent Boris Tarasov) - The 79th session of the Human Rights Committee which controls the implementation of the International pact on civil and political rights of 1966 and two protocols by the UN members states opens in Geneva on Monday.

On October 23-24 the committee including 18 independent experts from different countries is to consider Russia's 5th regular report. The Russian delegation headed by Justice Minister Yuri Chaika is to present the report.

The experts of the committee will also consider alternative documents drafted by Russian non-governmental organizations. "A detailed and complicated discussion" is expected, a diplomatic source in Geneva said. The human rights situation in the Chechen Republic is on the agenda.

[20.10.2003 20:09] TRP

Torture now routine for Putin's police

Corrupt force extracts confessions with 'elephant mask' and beatings

Once the policeman's gas mask was sealed tight around his face, Denis, 18, lasted 90 seconds before passing out. After a heavy beating by police fists and batons, Denis had still not confessed to stealing a car radio from a garage near his home. So two officers handcuffed his hands behind his back and clamped the 'elephant mask', as it is called, to his bruised head. They shut its valves and then waited.

'I thought it was all over, that I was going to die,' said Denis, a hardy car mechanic whose experience of police torture has left him unable to walk the streets without a gang of friends by his side.

Once the detainee was unconscious, the militsia, as the Russian police are known, panicked and dumped him in a cell. After he regained consciousness, he had still not signed a confession, so the police gave up and released him.

His friend Artur, who was arrested for the same alleged crime and beaten in the next room, was less resilient. He had heard people can die in police cells and so signed a confession prepared for him by the police after two doses of the 'elephant mask'.

Denis and Artur are two young victims of Russian police torture, which human rights groups say is spiralling out of control. An investigation by The Observer has established that boys as young as 16 are being tortured with electric shocks, asphyxiation and heavy beating in order to extract confessions. Poorly paid and ill-disciplined police, under pressure from Ministers to keep crime clear-up rates high, are resorting to any means to get confessions.

A poll of 32,000 people from across Russia published last week showed a quarter considered their rights had been violated by the police or courts over the past year.

Last month, Amnesty International released a report on 'rough justice' in Russia in which it cited a study by Krasnoyarsk University in central Siberia: 30 per cent of convicts said they had been physically or psychologically tortured into giving a confession.

Ten days ago, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov, a close associate of President Putin, had to declare internal corruption and brutality the police's primary target. 'We have declared now a war on corruption in our ranks,' he said, likening corrupt cops to 'terrorists' 'because [they] commit crimes against society'. Yet simultaneously a group of MPs wrote to Putin demanding Gryzlov be sacked for tolerating brutality and corruption for so long.

Pavel Chigov, head of the Kazan Human Rights Centre, said: 'There is a systematic use of torture by police to secure confessions. Police have a huge number of cases to solve, and are under great pressure to keep conviction rates high. Torture is the easiest way to close a case.'

He said young men were particularly vulnerable as they fitted the criminal stereotype of petty robbers and thieves and were easier targets. 'Police are also very badly paid,' he said. 'Thus, about 90 per cent of their time has to be given up to earning themselves more money over and above their salary [through private detective or protection work]. That leaves only 10 per cent of their time free for genuine police work. Under such time pressure, torture is also the quickest way of getting a confession.'

Yet one senior Moscow officer said: 'Several cases of bribe-taking and racketeering by our officers were recently discovered in Moscow and Stavropol. We have internal affairs departments to deal with that. But we have never detected any cases of beating or torturing.' He said even cases in which rioting football fans were manhandled were carefully investigated.

Yet Denis and Artur's case - for which two officers have been suspended - joins a body of evidence to the contrary. A July report by the Committee for the Prevention of Torture at the Council of Europe said 'a disturbing number of allegations of physical ill-treatment by members of the [police] involved violence aimed at the extraction of confessions from criminal suspects.'

Igor Kalyapin, chairman of the Nizhni Novgorod Committee against Torture, said: 'Normally in the very few cases when the guilt of the policeman is proven, they are given suspended sentences and sacked from work.'

He said Russian law did not list torture as a crime and so police were tried for the minor crime of 'abuse of office'. The longest sentence he had heard of was five years for electric shock torture.

[20.10.2003 20:10] Nick Paton Walsh/The Observer