• by IPS Correspondents (moscow)
• Friday, December 16, 1994
• Inter Press Service

MOSCOW, Dic 16 (IPS) - Hundreds of thousands of Russian convicts are held in over-crowded, and unsanitary cells in which ill-health and crime fester as the country's prison system collapses because of lack of funds.

For despite the overthrow of communism, Russia's penal code has yet to be reformed and earlier authoritarian practices which deny basic human rights are still in vogue, experts have said.

Moscow's Butyrka prison is so crowded that prisoners sleep in shifts and the 200-year old Motrosskya Tishina jail is literally crumbling. Elsewhere, prisons are in such a bad state that mass disturbances have broken out and the number of deaths in custody is rising.

International norms stipulate that each prisoner must have six square metres of space; the average Russian allocation is only one.

Similarly, sanitary and food standards have evoked concern over Russia's ability to adhere to its commitments under European and universal covenants whose implementation is set as a measure for the country's membership of regional bodies such as the Council of Europe.

The 27-member Council of Europe was founded in May 1949 to achieve greater unity between its members, to facilitate their economic and social progress and to uphold the principles of parliamentary democracy and respect for human rights.

Out of Russia's 178 corrective camps and prisons, 26 are said to be on the verge of collapse. More than 60 per cent of these institutions are located in buildings which were constructed between the 16th and 19th centuries.

An official Russian human rights report, which was squashed by the government earlier this year, stated that at the beginning of 1994, 876,003 Russians -- or, 0.6 per cent of the country's population -- were held in 1,076 prisons, penal colonies, correction institutes and under detention during investigation.

Sergei Kovalev, head of a Presidential Commission on Human Rights, has said that Russia's penal system is an area of the "most constant and massive human rights violations".

Kovalev's report which has been officially buried, states: "The situation in the penal system is still very far away from commonly accepted international norms and simple moral principles.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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