Some employees of the penitentiary system ignore calls to fight corruption - Eldar Zeynalov

This December is a month held under the auspices of the protection of human rights, where the most vulnerable is the problem of violation of the rights of prisoners due to their isolated situation. This problem is acute in Azerbaijan, as evidenced by the numerous cases of testimonies of prisoners released from places of detention and members of their families.

Director of the Human Rights Center of Azerbaijan Eldar Zeynalov answered Turan's questions about the situation in the penitentiary system of Azerbaijan.

***

Question: Does the legislation promote the observance of the rights of prisoners?

Answer: In this area, good legislation has been adopted in Azerbaijan, while we observe its insufficiently effective implementation. As a result of the reforms launched in 1996 to comply with the requirements of the Council of Europe, Azerbaijan adopted a good (in this part) Constitution, the Code for the Execution of Punishments (finalized), ratified several international conventions, adopted several decrees of the President and resolutions of the Cabinet of Ministers.

But the inertia of the consciousness of officials who follow the rule of bureaucracy interferes: "If you cannot do something, don't do it." An opinion has taken root, although it is no longer being expressed aloud now, that all these reforms are needed more by Europe, and not by us, who are already doing great, and that therefore the ratification of the conventions is not a signal for action, but simply a necessary measure to improve the image of the country.

There is a layer of employees of the penitentiary system who ignore calls to fight corruption, considering prisoners as a source of income. This is already recognized, and they are fighting against it. But it is difficult to wait for the learning of other people's lessons if a new person entering the system believes that his predecessor was simply unlucky and that "a thief is beaten not because he is a thief, but because he allowed himself to be caught." This stereotype of thinking concerns not only the penitentiary system. Let us recall the arrests of swindlers who promised to arrange for substantial bribes in one or another structure, where before that there were arrests of corrupt officials. Or the head of the district executive power, who was appointed to replace the removed predecessor, and after that stole humanitarian aid from the Heydar Aliyev Foundation.

The restoration of the violated rights of prisoners is conducted by the court, in respect of which, over the decades, our fellow citizens have developed a persistent distrust, mystical fear of going to court. I knew a prisoner who sent more than 80 complaints to various authorities but died without daring to go to court. Of course, it is possible to act through a lawyer, but the services of a good lawyer are not cheap. A free lawyer, as the prisoners say, is worse than a prosecutor.

I will also note that in terms of improving the financial conditions of the prisoners, the pandemic and military operations from Armenia had a negative impact, requiring additional financial costs for defense, and then for the restoration of the liberated regions. However, there seems to be a bright light here - this year, convicted women and teenagers were transferred to a new penitentiary facility with good conditions.

The problem of providing prisoners with socially useful work that would help them retain their labor skills and earn money is still not resolved. When prisoners sit within four walls at the expense of the state and their families, then such a prison does not heal, but cripples ...

Question: In which institutions do prisoners face the most violations of their rights?

Answer: The stricter the regime of detention in a penitentiary institution, the greater the natural pressure of the system on convicts and, thus, incentives for corruption. I say this because sadists and misanthropes are not recruited into the penitentiary system, and if an incident occurs with a gross violation of the rights of prisoners, then usually this is the desire of the staff to receive a bribe for effective treatment.

There is always a competition in prisons between prisoners who want to improve their conditions (including for bribes), and the administration, which must ensure order in the institution. At the same time, both sides recognize the immunity of the so-called. “Polozhnyak,” which in the jargon of prisoners means the totality of everything that is required by law for prisoners. Even the poorest prisoner (“poor guy”) should not be deprived of clothes, food, medical care, or visits from relatives. This has happened in the past, there have been complaints. Now they are isolated, and the prisoners avoid official appeals to the court or the prosecutor's office.

Question: Have there been more or fewer cases of torture in prisons and correctional facilities?

Answer: It is impossible to judge this in quantitative terms because there are no available statistics on complaints of torture or ill-treatment. I can only assume that internal statistics on the number of applications with such complaints is kept in the departments of the Prosecutor General's Office that oversee the investigative bodies and the execution of sentences. This year, the Prosecutor General's Office reported 397 victims of torture in the infamous "Terter case" (2017), while human rights activists assumed that there were about 100. So, it is quite easy to make a mistake in quantitative estimates. In addition, it is not reported how many people suffered from torture in other cases and in other years.

Such information is closed, and it is rarely confirmed by verification. Let us recall that the prosecutor's office supervising the investigation did not initially find torture even in cases where soldiers died during interrogations. The perpetrators (and not all) were convicted under lighter articles such as incitement to suicide, intentional infliction of grievous bodily harm, torture, threats to kill, abuse of power.

Therefore, we can only talk about qualitative changes. And when reviewing the “Terter case” in 2022, they finally recognized that we have torture, and applied the relevant article 293 of the Criminal Code against specific people. After the adoption in 2000 of the new Criminal Code, which included the crime of "torture", for more than 20 years this charge was not applied in Azerbaijan at all, and we constantly talked about this in alternative reports at the UN. Finally, it worked.

One can also recall several cases of unpunished death under torture in the pre-trial detention center of the Ministry of National Security of Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic (NAR) in 2012-2014, which were not recognized until the torture was confirmed by the European Court of Human Rights. The fact that the NAR has now deprived its own State Security Council (SSC) and reassigned this structure to Baku is an echo of those events, and this is also encouraging that Nakhchivan can cease to be a zone of lawlessness.

I also note that due to some earlier changes in the legislation, which removed the pre-trial detention center from the subordination of the investigating authorities and transferred them to the Ministry of Justice and require fixing bodily injuries upon admission to the pre-trial detention center, torture in the pre-trial detention center became unlikely. For example, the victims of the "Terter case" were tortured not in a pre-trial detention center or even in a guardhouse, but in some abandoned building.

Question: How are things going in specific institutions, such as the closed Gobustan prison, penitentiary institution No. 4 (for women) and educational institution for minors?

Answer: Human rights defenders, to the best of their ability, especially look after such penitentiary institutions as, for example, the Gobustan prison and colony of special regime No. 8. In the first - the cell content of prisoners, contains most of the life prisoners, as well as prisoners from ordinary jails, punished for systematic violations of the regime (it happens that under this pretext, the heads of the colonies get rid of restless prisoners). Among the lifers there are several dozen former suicide bombers who are still considered especially dangerous, even in comparison with those who were convicted after the abolition of the death penalty. Many have already served more than 25 years, but so far none of them have been released early, although there is such a possibility in the law. In prison No. 8, a third of the prisoners are also kept in cells, among them there are especially dangerous recidivists.

The cell content of prisoners is always a risk of mental disorders, conflicts, and diseases. This fully applies to pre-trial detention centers (SIZOs). Along with the pre-trial detention center equipped according to European standards in the village. Kurdakhani or the penitentiary complex in Sheki, in Azerbaijan there are still old isolation wards in Ganja and Shuvalany, where material conditions are much worse due to the ancient age of these prisons. For many years they have been promised to be demolished and replaced with modern ones.

The same problem is with the central prison hospital, which makes sense to build a new, according to modern standards. Now the concern is not the presence or absence of medicines, but the timely coordination of medical indications for placement in a hospital with security considerations - the administration can block the urgent transfer of a sick prisoner to a hospital. And there are not enough places for the treatment of dangerous prisoners, for example, lifers.

At one time, human rights activists were concerned about colony No. 3 for tuberculosis patients, where there was a high mortality rate, which has decreased tenfold since the 1990s. The situation of convicted women has significantly improved, in the colony of which there was a significant overload. And with minors in recent years there were no problems either with overload or with their treatment.

Question: On Friday, the United States imposed sanctions on Azerbaijani police officer Colonel Kerim Alimardanov for torture and human rights violations. Isn't this evidence that there is a problem of torture in the country?

Answer: This is clear, they paid attention to torture. The State Department directly accused the colonel of torturing detainees in 2015-2016. Although I do not remember that he was convicted for this by the final court decision that came into legal force, as required by the presumption of innocence.

It remains unclear why the United States reacted to the "pranks" of the police in the Band Department only now. Human rights activists have been writing about this since the early 1990s, noting that this fearsome institution was illegally used as a pre-trial detention center for cases that had nothing to do with the fight against organized crime, that torture was used there, and detainees were held longer than the legal time. At that time, many political prisoners passed through this “Gang Department,” and specific names were called by human rights activists, but no measures were taken by the State Department.

So, this is a purely political gesture on the part of the State Department. But eloquent enough.

Question: Can the recent events in Nakhchivan affect the penitentiary system of the autonomy? How are things going there?

Answer: The prisons of the Nakhchivan autonomy (the State Security Service and the Ministry of Justice) are a completely blank spot for human rights activists. In 2007, the Ministry of Justice of the NAR was created, which included the Penitentiary Service, to which the Detention Facility and the Security Regiment were subordinate. Later, a penitentiary complex was built, which included a pre-trial detention center and a mixed regime prison, after which Nakhchivans sentenced to detention in a general or strict regime prison could already be kept in their small homeland.

The consequence of this decision was that the Public Committee under the Ministry of Justice (MJ), established a year earlier to monitor the Ministry of Justice and the Penitentiary Service (PS) of the Republic of Azerbaijan, could not visit the PS MJ NAR. I may be wrong, but it seems that only the Ombudsman, also local, monitors these prisons. I heard from state officials that the material conditions in the prisons of the PS MJ NAR are good, but I have never seen human rights activists who have been there. Once human rights activists and journalists were going to do this, but they were expelled from the airport right on arrival in the NAR.

The NAR also created its own Ministry of National Security (then National Security Council), which has its own pre-trial detention center. Recently, the State Security Service of the NAR was liquidated, and on its basis the Department of the State Security Service of the Republic of Azerbaijan for the NAR was created. It is possible that the PS NAR will suffer the same fate. In any case, it is personally obvious to me that the isolation of the State Security Service and the PS of Nakhchivan led to a weakening of control over them. For example, smuggling through the NAR customs line was supposed to be detected not by the Baku State Security Service, but by the local one.

Irresponsible calls are being made on the Internet to eliminate the autonomy of Nakhchivan. This would be contrary to the Kars Treaty of 1921, according to which Nakhchivan is under the patronage (protectorate) of Azerbaijan, and not in its composition. But, nevertheless, it is not at all necessary for autonomy to have a complete set of departments. For the development and maintenance of prisons in the NAR, it would be useful to integrate them into the general penitentiary system of the AR.

Question: Transparency is an important barrier to abuse prevention. What is the situation with accountability in the penitentiary system?

Answer: To understand how transparent this system is, just visit its website. We live in the era of "electronic government», and this implies that this site should provide answers to the pressing questions of ordinary Internet users. In the matter of suppressing abuses or clarifying ambiguities, it is especially important to have laws, instructions, and ready-made answers to the most usual questions at your disposal. We will not find it on the PS website. It is good that there are telephones of the PS switchboard and the "Hot Line", her e-mail, but this is the way to complain to those whom you complain about, and not everyone has an e-mail. For some reason, there are no phones on duty at each colony. The feeling that the creators of the site were not interested in being able to complain about them with its help.

There is no information on the website about the number of prisoners in prisons and how many there are in each institution; how many convicted women, adolescents, foreigners, disabled people, pensioners, war veterans, AIDS and tuberculosis patients are kept, how many fell ill with coronavirus in a given month; how many punished and encouraged prisoners; how many and for what the staff is punished and how much is encouraged; how many prisoners were released at the end of their term and ahead of schedule, etc. All this information, which is not classified under the law, is hidden behind seven seals. But it is these figures that give an idea of how prisons live, how they develop and whether they help correction.

With few exceptions, all correspondence must be censored. The norm is a situation when a letter not certified by the administration is returned by the addressee to prison without consideration. Repeatedly my letters and those of the prisoners were intercepted. In some cases, when one of the prisoners sent letters and complaints bypassing the administration and this was opened, the authors were punished. In this situation, to communicate with the outside world and report problems, the prisoner must either have a lawyer or be a great conspirator.

A prison is not a passage yard, but a secure facility. But why such secrecy in simple matters?