Political prisoners in Russia and occupied Ukraine

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Bill Bowring highlights an important upcoming meeting.

In her recent Second Report to the UN, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation, Mariana Katzarova, reported that at least 1,372 human rights defenders, journalists and anti-war critics have been detained on politically motivated charges and sentenced in sham trials to lengthy imprisonment, often with treatment amounting to torture.

Widespread arbitrary detention, harsh sentencing and the deliberate use of torture and ill-treatment in detention, including frequent recourse to punitive solitary confinement for excessive periods, are commonly utilized against those who dare criticize the war against Ukraine. The continued imprisonment of political prisoners and denial of necessary treatment to those in a critical health condition, such as Alexei Gorinov, Igor Baryshnikov and Evgeny Bestuzhev, amount to torture and put them at risk of death in custody.

Age and contributions to society offer no protection against state-driven persecution.  Yuri Dmitriev, a 67-year-old historian of the Gulag and former head of the Karelian branch of Russian human rights organisation Memorial, imprisoned for exposing Stalinist-era crimes, repeatedly suffers prolonged punitive solitary confinement. Detained paediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova, 68 years old, faces five and a half years’ imprisonment in a penal colony, accused by the widow of a serviceman of expressing opposition to the war against Ukraine during the medical check-up of her child.

At least 53 anti-war activists are currently being punished by forced psychiatric detention that can be indefinite.

On Monday 18th November, from 6pm to 8pm, at the Montague Lecture Centre, Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of London, 327 Mile End Road, London, leading Russian and UK experts will explore these issues. Book here.

Speakers include UK experts on the Russian legal and penal system (Profs Judith Pallott, Oxford and Helsinki; and Bill Bowring, Birkbeck), alongside campaigners for prisoners’ rights in Russia (speakers from the Russian human rights organisation, Memorial, in exile), and in the territories of Ukraine, temporarily occupied by Russia (Yevgeniy Zakharov, director of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group).

Bill Bowring, Colchester CLP, teaches international law and human rights at Birkbeck College. He has travelled regularly to Russia since 1983, and to Ukraine since 1992, including work with Russian prisons. He has twice been arrested and deported from Russia. The Russian translation of his book The Degradation of the International Legal Order? The rehabilitation of law, and the possibility of politics (NLO Publishers, 2021), is no longer available in Russia. He contributed two chapters, on Russian approaches to international law and to human rights, to The Foundations of Russian Law (ed Marianna Mutavyeva, Bloomsbury 2023).

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%98%D0%9A-5.jpg View of the maximum security penal colony FKU IK-5, Kokhma, Ivanovo region, Russia. Author: Avtoloer, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.