The 70-year-old civic activist is now back
at home after a Health Ministry commission on July 26 organized her discharge.
Her release from forced confinement in a Zaporizhia psychiatric hospital should
be welcomed but this is not a happy ending just yet. Her daughter is facing two
administrative charges for “obstructing” police officials for behaving as most
of us would if close relatives were being dragged away against their will for
unnecessary psychiatric “treatment.” It seems clear the authorities were forced
to respond after immense public and international pressure, but have no
intention of learning any lessons from the occasion. Quite the contrary: the
commission, it is reported, “established,
firstly that treatment was timely; secondly that the treatment of the patient
was adequate. All of this made it possible to considerably improve her state of
health. Therefore the possibility is being considered of changing the form of
treatment from hospital-based to outpatient.”
In other words, the psychiatrists are
vindicated, as is the court which saw no problem with ordering the activist’s
forced confinement and “treatment.” And that’s despite a diagnosis that was at
least as questionable as the commission’s report.
Nonetheless, Raisa Radchenko is now free
thanks to considerable domestic and international pressure.
Less lucky are the three young men charged
with the bomb blast in the Sviatopokrovsk Orthodox Church in Zaporizhia on July
28, 2010. While most believe they are innocent hostages to a promise made by
the president on state television, there has been disturbingly little effort to
obtain their release and a full investigation into their allegations of
torture.
There is no proof of involvement in the
bomb blast, which killed an elderly nun during an afternoon service on July 28.
Although it occurred exactly a year, to the day, after a court ruling over a
land dispute involving the Church, investigators have never seemingly looked
into this fact – and not because they found a compelling alternative version.
There is no evidence against the young men aside from seven “confessions,”
which all three said were obtained through torture and threats.
Anton Kharitonov, a suspended sacristan of
the Church, was taken to the police station on the following morning after
President Viktor Yanukovych issued an order on television to find the culprits
within a week. The protocol of detention was only drawn up 13 hours later,
around midnight, before the first of four “confessions.”
Anton’s brother Serhiy Dyomin was taken
into custody that night, and 24 hours later during a nighttime interrogation “confessed”
to having made the bomb. When explosion experts placed his ability to make such
a bomb in question, he confessed to having bought the bomb “from an unidentified
individual.” A second sacristan, Yevhen Fedorchenko, was arrested a few days
later and supposedly also confessed.
Two forensic psychological assessments
effectively confirmed the use of unlawful pressure. Judge Minasov simply
ordered a third, which denied any. The judge turned down the application for
all three forensic psychologists to be called for questioning. The same judge
ignored serious infringements and turned a blind eye when the prosecution,
after a year and a half, changed the indictment to eliminate all three of the
young men’s alibis.
There was no evidence of guilt, plenty of
grounds for fearing a grave miscarriage of justice, yet at the beginning of
April Judge Minasov sentenced the men to 14 and 15 years imprisonment. The
appeal hearing was due at the beginning of July but then unexpectedly postponed
and the file sent back to the Zhovtnevy Court “to rectify inaccuracies.” What
this means is unclear and defense lawyers are concerned that attempts may be
made to falsify the records.
There has been no investigation into
allegations of torture and other violations of the right to a fair trial.
Although the ombudsperson did, quite correctly, once intercede in the case of a
Nigerian student held in detention for well over a year, her secretariat has
consistently asserted that she cannot get involved in any case still before the
courts.
The position of the European Court of
Human Rights is entirely unequivocal in all cases where there are multiple
confessions, well-founded fears that they were obtained through unlawful
methods of influence, and no other evidence. However, the European Court’s
backlog is huge and in any case all domestic avenues must first be exhausted.
Three young men are beginning their fourth
year in detention, with no news on their appeal, and near silence from the
media and the public. If the policy is deliberate, it is frighteningly
effective.
Halya Coynash is a member of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group.
