Prisoner transportation in Russia: travelling into the unknown

Heather McGill, a researcher currently working on Central Asia for Amnesty International, discusses her recent report on prisoner transportation in Russia, which was launched in October 2017.

Prisoners are always at greater risk during transportation, but prison transportation in Russia is in a league of its own. The size of the country combined with the location of the penal colonies in the periphery means that prisoners face journeys of thousands of kilometres. The journeys routinely last a month or more, and prisoners are transported in prison vans and specially designed train carriages where conditions are often so overcrowded that they amount to torture and other ill-treatment. Furthermore, there is no obligation on the prison authorities to inform the prisoners’ families or lawyers that they are being transported until after they arrive at their final destination.

The whole process of prisoner transportation does at times seem to be like a parallel world to the ‘almost invisible, almost imperceptible country’ described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago. During my work over the past two decades on Russia and the former Soviet Union, aspects of that world periodically came to my attention; for instance in October 2016, the female taxi driver taking me to the airport in Krasnoyarsk told me that her other job was as a heating engineer on a prison train carriage run by the Federal Penitentiary Service. Then, in December, Ildar Dadin, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, ‘disappeared’ for over a month when he was transferred from a prison colony in Komi in the Far North to a colony in the Altai Region close to the border with Kazakhstan. His wife repeatedly asked the prison authorities to inform her about his whereabouts, but was met with stony silence or at best the response that ‘in accordance with the Federal Law on Personal Data, information about a person cannot be released to a third party without that person’s permission.’

It was the case of Ildar Dadin that prompted me to look into how prisoner transportation is carried out in Russia, and as I probed to try and find out why the journeys took so much time, I uncovered a huge undertaking governed by internal instructions, very few laws, and cloaked in secrecy. The Federal Penitentiary Service transports prisoners across 6,000 km and 11 time zones to its 760 penal institutions. This task is carried out by a dedicated Convoy Unit with over 20,000 staff. Special train carriages for the transportation of prisoners are hitched to regular passenger and post office trains.

A member of the board of Memorial demonstrating the dimensions of an isolation compartment. © Ernest Mezak

The basic design of the train carriages has not changed since Soviet times – the larger compartments are 3.5 square metres, and internal instructions allow for there to be up to 12 prisoners, which allows for 0.29 square meters per person. The overcrowding is exacerbated by the fact that each prisoner must carry with him or her all their belongings, and there is no provision for baggage on the trains. The compartments have no windows and there is a grating which gives on to the train corridor. Prisoners may spend up to 60 hours in such conditions, before breaking the journey in one of the many transit cells located in remand prisons or prison colonies throughout Russia.

The conditions in the prison vans are no better. The vans consist of two larger compartments accommodating 10 prisoners with an area of three square meters, and one small isolation compartment or ‘stakan’ (glass) that has an area of between 0.3 and 0.5 square metres, which is used to accommodate ‘vulnerable’ prisoners (among those classed as vulnerable are women, and former prison officers). It is quite common for two prisoners to be accommodated in the small isolation compartments along with all their baggage.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled in at least two cases that the overcrowding during the transportation of prisoners in the Russian Federation equates to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Most recently on 5 May 2017, the ECtHR ruled that eight prisoners had been kept in conditions that amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during transportation between remand prisons and court rooms, including Anna Lozinskaya, and awarded them 5,000 euros compensation.

Aside from the overcrowding, prisoners suffer other forms of ill-treatment. Hennadiy (Gennadiy) Afanasiev and Dmitry Vasiliev, former prisoners I interviewed during my research, both drew attention to the problem of access to toilets in transit. Transit prisoners are allowed access to the toilets every five to six hours, and not at all when the train is stationary. Prison carriages are parked for many hours on sidings, when prisoners will not have access to the toilets at all.

The ‘disappearance’ of prisoners in Russia for weeks at a time during transportation can be viewed under international law as an enforced disappearance, and as such it is a grave human rights violation.

The only legal obligation on the prison authorities to inform relatives or legal representatives about the whereabouts of the prisoner is Article 17 of the Criminal Executive Code, which requires them to inform one relative within 10 days of the prisoner’s arrival at the penal institution. Since journeys usually last a month or more, and the prison authorities can be slow to send a notification, relatives are often left in the dark for months. Even the prisoners themselves are not told what their final destination is. It is hard to imagine the disorienting effect of being transported thousands of kilometres across time zones, often into a completely alien environment, most of the time in train compartments without windows, with no idea of the time and no contact with the outside world.

The ‘disappearance’ of prisoners in Russia for weeks at a time during transportation can be viewed under international law as an enforced disappearance, and as such it is a grave human rights violation.

Russian corrective colonies are located in sparsely populated parts of the country in the far north and the far east of the country. This is due to their origins as forced labour camps for the extraction of natural resources. The location of Russia’s corrective colonies in such far-flung places, so far from the densely inhabited parts of the country, is not compatible with a modern penitentiary system that aims to rehabilitate offenders. It deprives prisoners of vital family visits and punishes the families by forcing them to make arduous and expensive journeys of several days to visit their incarcerated relatives. According to Article 73 of the Criminal Executive Code of the Russian Federation, convicted prisoners should serve their sentence ‘in penal institutions within the boundaries of the territorial unit of the Russian Federation in which they had been living or were sentenced.’ However, the legislation provides so many exceptions to this rule that in reality most prisoners are sent very long distances to serve their sentences. Paradoxically women and minors are exempted from the principle on the basis that there are fewer corrective colonies for these categories. Prisoners who have committed particularly serious crimes can also be sent far away.

Russia abolished exile as a punishment in 1992, yet the idea that offenders should be sent as far away as possible as a form of punishment remains imbedded in the penitentiary system.[1] It is time to bring the Russian penitentiary system up to date, to stop transporting prisoners vast distances in degrading conditions, and to restructure the system so that it better serves the rehabilitation of prisoners by ensuring that they are within reach of their families.

• [1] Judith Pallot analyses the use of distance as a punishment in Russia and describes the effects of distance on prisoners and their families in her books. For instance, Gender, Geography, and Punishment: The Experience of Women in Carceral Russia, Judith Pallot and Laura Piacentini, Oxford University Press 2012.

Main image: View from a compartment on a prisoner transportation carriage. © Photo taken by Ernest Mezak

More information

Rule 73 of the the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (revised in 2015 as the Nelson Mandela Rules) states that the ‘transport of prisoners in conveyances with inadequate ventilation or light, or in any way which would subject them to unnecessary physical hardship, shall be prohibited.’ Download a copy of the Nelson Mandela Rules here.