Surveillance Visibility

The struggle for the personnel of the PMC against the backdrop of mass torture turns into a political problem

On October 27, the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow denied Yevgeny Enikeev and Zoya Svetova their claims to cancel the decision of the council of the Public Chamber related to the non-approval of their candidacies to the PMC - the Public Monitoring Commission of Moscow. Another claim of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), which put forward these candidates, will be considered there on November 3, but nothing new can be expected.

Lawsuits were prepared by lawyer Daria Gryaznova, and represented in court by Irina Sergeeva. The legal procedure was started by the applicants and supported by the MHG without much hope of success, but in order to force the defendant - in fact, the Public Chamber - to reveal the mechanism for appointing members of the PMC, which is completely opaque: Enikeeva and Svetova, whom the MHG asked to appoint to replace Marina expelled from the PMC Litvinovich and other members who left, simply reported that the majority of the members of the council of the chamber gave them "zero points", that is, they voted their candidacies out without any explanation of the reasons.

Yulia Davydova, the head of the legal department of the FKU “Apparatus of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation”, came to the court to represent the Civic Chamber. did not authorize her to speak in court on behalf of the Public Chamber.

Meanwhile, the struggle for the personal composition of the PMC, which the council of the Public Chamber approves for the commissions of all subjects of the federation, today, after evidence of mass torture in places of detention has once again appeared in the media, is growing to the level of a national political problem.

State supervision over the detention of people in the institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service is not able to prevent even direct torture, not to mention the creation of "torture conditions",

what the European Court of Human Rights constantly points out to Russia.

The law on the PMC, prepared with the participation of the legendary human rights activist and prisoner, deputy of the Duma of the second convocation Sergei Adamovich Kovalev, and introduced in 2000, was only adopted in 2008, during the “Medvedev thaw”. He delegated to the members of the PMC state, in fact, powers, the main of which is "unhindered access" to places of detention under the jurisdiction of the Federal Penitentiary Service and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, as well as the opportunity to ask questions related to the observance of their rights to those who are detained there.

There were many human rights activists in the first compositions of the PMC, and their visits to places of deprivation of liberty significantly influenced the regime in them. Over time, the “siloviki” assessed the danger of the PMC for themselves and launched a fight against them along two lines: restricting access (including now under the pretext of an epidemic) and bringing fixing equipment by members of the PMC into closed institutions, as well as by ousting human rights activists from the PMC and replacing them people loyal to the “siloviki” through the Public Chamber.

During the last rotations, the Moscow PMC did not include the most active and qualified participants: Andrey Babushkin, Zoya Svetova and others, and Yana Teplitskaya and Ekaterina Kosarevskaya, who actively exposed the practice of torture, including on the St. Petersburg branch, were not included in the PMC of St. Petersburg "cases of the Network" ( an organization banned in the Russian Federation ). In the spring of 2021, under a far-fetched pretext, Marina Litvinovich was expelled from the PMC, who actively visited prisoners in the Lefortovo pre-trial detention center and administrative detainees during the mass actions at the beginning of the year in Sakharovo. On the other hand, the PMC of the capital included the leader of the informal association of private security companies, Dmitry Galochkin, and other little-known persons in the human rights community.

The head of the MHG, Lyudmila Alekseeva, who left us three years ago, loved to repeat the Soviet mantra: “Human rights is not a political activity, since it is not a struggle for power.” I think that it was to some extent slyness, in the highest degree and in the best sense characteristic of her.

Human rights protection is a struggle against power: the power to torture people and mock them, which, in fact, was appropriated by the jailers.

The meaning of torture and "torture conditions", apart from perverted sadism, is to achieve slavish "calm" in the institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service, as well as to extort testimony in the interests of the investigating authorities. Accordingly, the struggle for human rights in penitentiary institutions is a matter of politics.

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard singled out "simulacra" of the second and third levels: on the second, the simulacrum hides and distorts reality, and on the third, it hides the fact that the original from which the simulacrum is derived no longer exists. In this sense, the PMC can still be attributed to the second level, and the Public Chamber - already, probably, to the third. The main question is what level our criminal proceedings are a simulacrum of: if the courts did not ignore, as they do today, information about torture, then there would be no problem in admitting human rights defenders to places of deprivation of liberty.