14 June 2022, 14:31
Rights defenders note systemic nature of torturing detainees in Kuban
In Sochi, a former policeman has been convicted of assaulting a female detainee, partly because the incident occurred in a public place; while torture cases at law enforcement bodies are more difficult to bring to court due to law enforcers' frank pledge and absence of video cameras in their offices. This was stated by lawyers and human rights defenders.
The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that on June 8, a Sochi court sentenced the policeman, Artyom Rudenko, to four years' of conditional imprisonment. In October 2021, he handcuffed the woman and broke her arm.
In judicial cases, "inequality before the law of ordinary people and people endowed with official powers" is often observed, Sergey Kostyuk, an advocate, has noted. He cited the case of Alexei Vlasenko as an example. The young man left the police station with traces of beatings, but investigators concluded that Vlasenko had inflicted beatings on himself; and they arrested him within the case of a false denunciation.
"The man who had broken the woman's arm was not even taken into custody ... While the man who declared the crime was accused of false denunciation without any proofs," Mr Kostyuk has stated, adding that he "had noticed an increase in violence applied by law enforcers since around 2012." "Then, dissatisfaction with the authorities in the society began growing," the advocate has pointed out.
The cases of abuse of powers by law enforcers usually "are moving very slowly," said Sergey Romanov, an employee of the Committee against Torture (CaT)*. "But, despite this, we manage to bring things to an end. Thus, we came to the verdict of two traffic policemen in the case of Evgeny Marchenko ... About 10 more criminal cases against law enforcers are at the investigation stage," Mr Romanov said.
This article was originally published on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’ on June 13, 2022 at 11:38 am MSK. To access the full text of the article, click here.
Author: Svetlana Kravchenko Source: CK correspondent
