PANEL III CHALLENGES IN THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE DECISIONS OF THE COMMITTEE AGAINST TORTURE Remarks of Karinna Moskalenko* community, including the efforts of our Center, the criminalization of torture by the Russian national Criminal Code has been achieved. The truth is that the criminalization has not been applied much yet, but this is not because there is no torture—this we do not believe—but because the way out of an authoritarian state is a long and complicated one, and we are grateful to the international community that this important step on the way has been accomplished. At least there is recognition of the existence of torture and of the notion that this crime is a corpus delicti and thus those perpetrators who think that they are acting in the best interest of the investigation, or the best interest of justice, or the best interest of combating terrorism, at least now realize that they are, in fact, criminals. As mentioned, this is a long process but at least society now is aware of torture being a crime. This awareness needs to be strengthened along with the use of international mechanisms and the implementation of the judgments, of which, as I said, we have obtained plenty. Introduction F irst of all, I will speak about a small group of practicing lawyers, called the International Protection Center, working in Russia with its sister organization, Centre de la Protection Internationale, based in Strasbourg, France, and about how we do international litigation work for the victims of torture and other abuses. One of our recent cases was this case that I had many doubts that we could win. It shocked our legal community. What I was worried about in this case was that judges of the [European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR)] would never believe that, in the 21st century, it is possible to rip twenty nails from a person’s hands and feet one by one. Fortunately, their cruelty went so far that they forced the prisoner to clean the room, which was then covered in blood; after this, he hid the nails in some place and later managed to take them. We brought this evidence to the European Court. In response, the authorities said that this is a kind of illness, nails fall out like leaves from the trees. Thanks to this absurd position we won another case. It is quite unbelievable but this small group has already won 200 cases before the European Court of Human Rights as well as several cases before the UN Human Rights Committee. Russian Prison & Detention System Now, I would like to skip definitions and the structure of bodies as well as the procedure for examination of complaints, which have been discussed by previous speakers, and go directly to an analysis of violations based on specific cases. I will start with a couple of words on the Russian penitentiary system because the largest number of the complaints by the Center to the European Court of Human Rights concern Article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights,2 which deals with torture and inhuman and degrading treatment, the same area as CAT. In Russia, there is an endemic and systemic problem of inhuman treatment of prisoners, and since the Russian prison population is so enormous—close to one million persons—this problem takes on horrendous dimensions. In numerous cases, the European Court, and also the UN Human Rights Committee have recognized a violation—in everyday routine practice—of the rights of prisoners. Now, this violation was first recognized in the case Kalashnikov v. Russia in 2002,3 when I represented this case in the very first public hearing of a Russian case before the ECtHR in September 2001. I had a chance to bring the attention of the Court to the issue that people who are not yet convicted, but only accused of committing a crime, are kept in more cruel conditions than those who are being punished for a crime. And this uncovers a great, immense prejudice in the attitude toward prisoners, toward The mechanism of the [Convention against Torture (CAT)]1 opens up another area of activity for us. For example, the effectiveness of CAT can be demonstrated by the fact that after many years of lobbying efforts by the Russian human rights * Karinna Moskalenko is a Russian human rights lawyer. 24