Translated material
Personal experience
The prosecutor convicted of organizing a murder was recognized as a victim of inhuman treatment
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) yesterday ordered Russia to pay compensation of 6 thousand euros to the former prosecutor of the environmental prosecutor's office of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Alexander Grishin. The ECHR recognized that in relation to the prosecutor, who was once convicted of organizing an attempted murder and had already served his sentence, Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights was violated - the prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment.Prosecutor Alexander Grishin was arrested in September 1999 (then he was 55 years old), he was accused of organizing an attempt on the life of the director of the Krasnoyarsk jewelry store "Crystal" Raisa Gubkina. This happened two years earlier - a woman was attacked in the entrance and shot at with a pistol. With a serious wound to the neck, she managed to crawl to her neighbors, who called an ambulance. Doctors performed several operations on Ms. Gubkina and were able to save her. At first, the arrest of the prosecutor caused general bewilderment - the victim had never known him, and Mr. Grishin himself denied involvement in the assassination attempt. But the investigation put forward a version, which was later confirmed by the court: the prosecutor wanted to put “his own man” in the place of the director of the jewelry store. In October 2000, the accused was released on bail. By a verdict of the Krasnoyarsk Regional Court in March 2001, Mr. Grishin was sentenced to eight years in a maximum security colony and stripped of the title of senior justice adviser. The perpetrators, members of the Krasnoyarsk organized crime group, brothers Alexander and Yuri Mosin, received a much more severe punishment - 22 and 25 years of maximum security, since their involvement in several more murders was established.
After an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the sentence, in April 2002 Grishin went to serve his sentence in a colony. Three years later he was released on parole.
The former prosecutor wrote his complaint to the ECHR while still in prison, stating that he was subjected to torture and inhuman treatment. In particular, he complained about the far from ideal conditions of detention in Krasnoyarsk pre-trial detention center No. 1, and that he was constantly beaten by investigators and fellow inmates. He was also denied medical care, although the ex-prosecutor, according to doctors’ diagnosis made shortly after his arrest, suffered from coronary heart disease, tonsillitis, hypertension, myopia and chronic bronchitis. A year later, encephalopathy (non-inflammatory organic brain damage), prostate adenoma and atherosclerotic cardiosclerosis were added to this bouquet. And by the time he was released on bail, Grishin was also diagnosed with a cerebral blood supply disorder. In his complaint to the ECHR, he described the numerous medical examinations that followed. In the Irkutsk colony, the convicted prosecutor almost never left the hospital, and for three years every summer he was sent home to Krasnoyarsk for a month.
According to Mr. Grishin, such a serious health condition was caused by the systematic beatings to which he was subjected in the pre-trial detention center. He wrote to Strasbourg that investigators beat him immediately after his arrest, and then he was subjected to executions by them several more times. His cellmates also beat him - they broke several of his teeth and caused serious brain injury. All this, however, was categorically denied by the Russian authorities when responding to relevant requests from the ECHR. The prosecutor also complained about the poor conditions in the pre-trial detention center - he had to live for months in cramped cells, where there were two or three prisoners per square meter, they slept in turns, and he had to sit on his own suitcases. The barred windows of the prison, Grishin complained, did not allow either daylight or fresh air into the cell. In addition, I had to relieve myself in full view of all my cellmates and prison guards, since the toilet was not isolated from the main room. The prisoners ate at a table located just one meter from the always dirty toilet. The cells were infested with cockroaches and blood-sucking insects, and it was possible to wash only once a week and for no longer than eight to ten minutes, since there were twice as many people interested as there were showers.
But the ECtHR decided that it could not conclude that harm was caused to the applicant’s health due to the failure to provide him with medical care or inadequate conditions of detention in prison, since Mr. Grishin did not provide any medical documents confirming this.
As for inhuman treatment, as the ECtHR noted in its decision, the applicant provided too few details about it, “he was unable to indicate even approximate dates” when such cases took place. The document says that the doctors, when diagnosing Grishin, never indicated that his illnesses were the result of anything other than natural causes. The former prosecutor also failed to prove that due to the beatings his teeth were broken and he suffered a brain injury. The ECtHR decided that since the applicant never tried to draw the attention of Russian courts and law enforcement agencies to the facts of inhuman treatment of him, his complaint in this part should be rejected.
The only thing the ECHR agreed with was the inadequate conditions of detention in the cell, which in Europe are traditionally equated to torture. “For more than a year, the applicant was kept in an overcrowded cell with inadequate sanitary facilities, poor hygiene and insufficient daylight and ventilation,” the ECtHR ruling said.
Thus, the court decided, the former prosecutor still deserves compensation for the moral suffering he suffered in prison, and estimated it at 6 thousand euros, although Mr. Grishin himself was counting on 290 thousand euros.
Yesterday, the ECHR made decisions on three so-called “Chechen cases” at once. Compensations for them are usually significant, and this time the Strasbourg court decided to pay a total of 260 thousand dollars. In particular, the Russian authorities are obliged to pay more than 40 thousand euros to Khamzat Kukaev, the father of the Chechen policeman Aslanbek Kukaev, who was killed in November 2000 in Grozny, during a special operation by federal forces in the Central Market. Despite the fact that Kukaev served in a special police detachment under the Internal Affairs Directorate for the Chechen Republic, he was detained and arrested, and was later found murdered. As usual, the culprits were not found, and the criminal case was closed. The ECHR found that Kukaev’s rights to life and the right to an effective remedy were violated. The father of the murdered policeman, who suffered severe moral suffering due to the loss of his son and the inability to achieve a fair investigation, according to the court, was thus subjected to inhumane treatment by the authorities.