The project was prepared “in three weeks in the silence of the offices”
Senator Lyudmila Narusova believes that the bill on combating torture submitted to the State Duma will not help to seriously combat this phenomenon. She said this at a briefing held on December 29.
Photo: Lilia Sharlovskaya
During the briefing, Senator Narusova also spoke about the most fundamental differences between the version of the law prepared by her and her colleagues from what was introduced by Klishas and Krasheninnikov. First of all, it concerns the definition of torture. To them, as it was said, the Duma version of the law suggests not to include the suffering caused duringthe application of legal sanctions or impact, as well as delivered unintentionally. This, it was said at the briefing, “leaves loopholes for arbitrariness.” In addition, the proposed version of the law does not refer to torture suffering caused without the use of physical influence – sleep deprivation, inability to take necessary medications, etc.
In general, Lyudmila Narusova and her colleagues propose to make a number of adjustments to the legislation (criminal procedure, regulating the work of places of deprivation of liberty, etc.) in order, among other things, to make the torture itself meaningless: so that the evidence obtained with their help is not accepted by the courts, and the people who participated in their application could not hide from responsibility. To do this, it is proposed to single out torture as a separatethe composition of a criminal offense, especially grave, since in this case we are talking about an attempt on the rights enshrined in the Constitution, to introduce a three-day period for the provision of a medical report on the condition of an allegedly tortured person, to document in detail the time and reasons for the movement of persons deprived of liberty from cell to cell, to strengthen the responsibility of the heads of relevant institutions for creating conditions for torture.