The bars will be opened for the disabled – Newspaper Kommersant No. 197 (7398) dated 10/24/2022
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Parliamentarians and human rights activists are jointly preparing a package of bills to help people with disabilities in pre-trial detention centers and colonies. The amendments provide for a ban on his election of guards at the trial stage. The authors also propose to introduce a limit of punishment for disabled people of the first group – a maximum of 20 years in prison. In addition, the institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service will be offered to hire orderlies so that prisoners with disabilities do not have to “solder or cigarettes” to pay for the help of their cellmates.
A working group has been set up in the State Duma to develop bills to support prisoners with disabilities. It was headed by a member of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, Eva Merkacheva. Now in the institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service there are about 17.8 thousand people with disabilities, Ms. Merkacheva told Kommersant, and 423 prisoners have the first, most severe group of disabilities. “Perhaps this will seem like a small number to some. But the first group of disability is given to people who cannot take care of themselves. These are people without both legs or arms, blind or deaf-mute,” she said.
People with disabilities are most often kept in common cells and do not receive enough help from employees, the human rights activist says. Thus, there are about 130 disabled people in eight Moscow pre-trial detention centers. But there is not a single orderly there, and the only prison hospital in the capital is not adapted for people with limited mobility, “there are no handrails in the toilets, and the elevator has not been working since 2013, so in the five-story building, the convoy and doctors drag people on themselves or on stretchers, which do not pass into a narrow flight of stairs.
Spot improvements are still taking place: for example, in 2015, the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center was equipped with a ramp. This happened when the ex-mayor of Makhachkala, Said Amirov, was brought there – a disabled person of the first group who moves in a wheelchair (Said Amirov was accused of preparing a terrorist attack and illegal arms trafficking; he received a life sentence). This year, SIZO-4 prepared a special cell for the disabled to keep the blind Dmitry Tulyaninov there (accused of fraud). “In an ordinary cell, Dmitry constantly bumped into other people, the corners of the beds and the table. He was burned with boiling water, and once he was seriously injured on a walk, tripping over bins of food, – said Eva Merkacheva. – This is an injury received through the fault of the state, which placed him in such conditions. At the same time, Dmitry suffers from a severe mental illness and has been disabled since childhood, marked “indefinitely.” Human rights activists propose not to place people with disabilities in a pre-trial detention center at the stage of the trial, but to place them under house arrest.
The second initiative was prepared by Senator Lyudmila Narusova. She proposes not to place disabled people of the first group in colonies for life sentences and not to assign them more than 20 years in prison. The third initiative concerns the Individual Program for the Rehabilitation and Habilitation of the Disabled (IPRA). Doctors prescribe such programs to people with disabilities, but they are not available in places of deprivation of liberty, Eva Merkacheva is sure. “In some colonies, detachments for the disabled were created, but in reality people remain without help there. They are helped only by cellmates, and in 90% of cases – for selfish reasons. That is, a disabled person gives them his rations, pays with cigarettes, and for this he can be dragged to the shower,” she says. Mrs. Merkacheva proposes to oblige colonies to provide prisoners with IPR, and if it is impossible to provide rehabilitation in a pre-trial detention center “at least until the verdict”, release a person under house arrest.
The work of the group is supervised by Yaroslav Nilov (LDPR), Chairman of the Duma Labor Committee (who also deals with issues of protecting the rights of disabled people). He confirmed to Kommersant that he intends to “make any initiatives” of the working group, if they do not contradict the “settlements of the Liberal Democratic Party.” However, Mr. Nilov is sure that disability “cannot be an indulgence from arrest, from detention,” with the exception of charges of minor crimes. In the near future, the deputy intends to consider each of the ten cases of life-sentenced disabled people. He did not rule out that legislators will eventually supplement the “list of categories for which the limitation of liability applies” with a disability of the first group.
Kommersant asked the regional public monitoring commissions (POC) to talk about the situation with disabled prisoners. Oleg Galin, chairman of the PMC of Bashkiria, said that detachments for the disabled had been created in the republic, confirming that “if necessary” they were accompanied for a walk not by orderlies, but by other prisoners. According to him, individual rehabilitation plans are being implemented in the region. “Some disabled people have diet tables, ramps, technical rehabilitation facilities, wheelchairs, canes. Sometimes they complain about the lack of medicines. If the department does not have these medicines and there is nothing to replace them with, relatives send them through the medical unit,” he said.
There are 339 prisoners with disabilities in the Krasnodar Territory, 13 of them are of the first group, said Anzaur Akhidzhak, chairman of the regional POC. He mentioned problems with medicines, but stated that the commission had not received “complaints about violations of the rights of persons with disabilities.” There are no complaints in the Nizhny Novgorod region, assures the regional ombudsman Oksana Kislitsina. According to her, there are “about 500 prisoners with disabilities in the region, 14 of them are of the first group.” The Nizhny Novgorod PMC reported that disabled prisoners mostly complain about the inability to register disability or get another group.
In the pre-trial detention center of Dagestan, 42 people are kept with the second group and 64 with the third group, Kommersant was told in the PMC of the republic. The chairman of the commission, Omar Omarov, received a complaint about the conditions of detention. “They reacted and changed the preventive measure to house arrest, despite the fact that the person’s article was “heavy”, 134th (acts of a sexual nature with a person under the age of 16.— “b”)”,- he said. In Chuvashia, there are 130 prisoners with disabilities, said the chairman of the POC Sergey Samostyuk. Seven needed wheelchairs and “already got them.” According to the Ombudsman of the Ulyanovsk region Sergey Lyulkov, they have 169 people with disabilities in pre-trial detention centers and colonies, one of them with the first group. There were no complaints from them, says Rafael Mardeev, chairman of the regional PMC. However, he himself pointed out to the Federal Penitentiary Service a number of violations: “The absence of handrails in the showers, high curbs, narrow doorways where a wheelchair could not pass. But all comments have been eliminated.
In Primorsky Krai, there are about 430 people with disabilities in places of deprivation of liberty, about 20 of them are of the first group, Vladimir Naidin, head of the local PMC, told Kommersant. According to him, 70% of complaints from them relate to problems with qualified medical care. “Even in SIZO-1 in Vladivostok, people wait weeks for an opportunity to get to a highly specialized doctor or for an examination. Disabled people with injuries of the musculoskeletal system depend on other prisoners, without outside help they cannot even climb the stairs to the second floor,” he said.
The former chairman of the POC of the Novosibirsk Region, Yevgeny Anisimov, connects the problems with providing living and medical conditions for disabled prisoners with the financing of the Federal Penitentiary Service: according to him, it is “more and more difficult to knock money out of the department” every year. The Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia did not respond to the editorial request.
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