We need a new prison

The working group of the public commission for interaction with the judicial community of Moscow decided that Butyrka should be closed, writes Kommersant. Both the Investigative Committee and independent experts consider former employees of this pre-trial detention center to be guilty of the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The newspaper notes that earlier the Prosecutor General's Office had already recognized the conditions of detention in Butyrka as dangerous for prisoners.

Renovations have begun at Butyrka, but even this, according to experts, is not enough. According to the newspaper, according to the words of the chairman of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission for Ensuring Human Rights in Prisons, Valery Borshchov, the leadership of the Federal Penitentiary Service recognized small cells like the one in which Magnitsky was kept as “torture.” They were destroyed, but are now being converted into solitary punishment cells. The new head of Butyrka, Sergei Telyatnikov (his predecessor Dmitry Komnov lost his post after the scandal surrounding the death of Magnitsky), according to Borshchov, is trying to do a lot to improve the situation of prisoners in the pre-trial detention center, but all this is useless.

The reason why a new pre-trial detention center is not being built is, as usual, related to funding, the newspaper writes.

The proposals made by the working group led by the leader of the movement “For Human Rights” Lev Ponomarev have already been supported by the leadership of the Moscow City Court. In particular, it is proposed to create commissions of doctors independent from the pre-trial detention center, the investigation and the person being examined.