Since a
court in Zaporizhya on July 15 disregarded the highly questionable
nature of the psychiatric assessment, as well as objections from Ms
Radchenko, her family and lawyer and ordered her forced psychiatric
treatment, more pressure is needed to secure her release, and to
ensure that the spectre of punitive psychiatry is laid to rest –
hopefully once and for all.
Amnesty
International has issued a second
urgent appeal
demanding that 70-year-old Raisa
Radchenko be discharged now, in advance of an independent assessment,
and for the harassment of her daughter and grandson to stop. An
appeal
(in Ukrainian) was
launched on Thursday with the same demands.
Most
former Soviet political prisoners, whether held in labour camps or
psychiatric hospitals, later spoke of how important it was to know
that people in the West were campaigning on their behalf. Not one or
two, but many.
In the
light of Thursday’s conviction of Alexei Navalny in Russia and the
disturbing way Ukraine has been following Russia’s repressive lead
in the last three years, it is surely time for Ukrainians, and others
concerned with the application of the rule of law in Ukraine, to take
a more proactive role. In the two cases mentioned here, and in
others, public scrutiny is vital.
Raisa
Radchenko has long campaigned against corruption in the housing and
communal services sphere and on other issues. At the end of May she
gave a coherent and compelling interview explaining why she launched
a petition for the dismissal of the Mayor of Zaporizhia. Her
activism, as well as the vehement protest from her family and
neighbours to her forced hospitalization, aroused concern and
considerable media attention well-beyond Zaporizhia, with Amnesty
International issuing a first urgent action appeal on 16 July.
Human
rights ombudsperson Valeria Lutkovska stated on Thursday that the
case had been under her personal control since July 12. If so, it is
regrettable that nobody from the secretariat saw the need to examine
Raisa Radchenko and then attend the court hearing on July 15. Ms
Lutkovska said that she will attend the appeal hearing, but it
remains unclear when this will happen.
One
undoubted benefit of the delegation’s visit was that it identified
an attempt by the police to apply pressure on Raisa Radchenko’s
daughter, Darya, by inventing an “anonymous report” as a pretext
for visiting her home, purportedly to see whether her son should be
taken away from her.
While the
degree of public concern has probably been instrumental in preventing
Raisa Radchenko from simply disappearing in a psychiatric ward, there
is precious little else to say that’s positive about this case.
According
to Darya Radchenko, her mother had never had any treatment and the
psychiatric opinion confirms that she was at the hospital for the
first time. There are doubts about the motives of those who
apparently lodged complaints, and even the opinion, which ends with
asserting the need for hospitalization, describes a person with
strong convictions and an adamant rejection of the “treatment”
proposed. Without any brain scan, and with no real clarity as to how
they arrived at their conclusion, it is then stated that “that she
has a personality and behaviour disorder – as the result of organic
damage to the brain (cerebral arteriosclerosis, hypertonic illness);
paranoid syndrome with aggressive actions.”
Raisa
Radchenko’s lawyer has been prevented from seeing her client; Darya
Radchenko has also encountered obstruction. And this is happening in
a situation where the hospitalization has been challenged and the
appeal not yet heard. Particularly telling was the refusal by the
court on July 15 to allow an independent assessment.
Psychiatric
health is a specialized field, and should, ideally, be left to
professionals. Unfortunately, this requirement makes the scope for
abuse great, as we know from Soviet times. Most of us have no access
to full information and those who do have the access and authority
are by no means always willing to react. This inevitably creates a
dilemma since public attention and “noise” are needed to force
the authorities to act, but the grounds of this push to action can be
unfounded. The risk, however, of saying nothing and hoping that those
who have clout will use it, is great.
This
time the concerns would seem to have been warranted, and pressure is
now needed to ensure that Raisa Radchenko is released and that the
harassment of her family stops. This is not only in defence of one
elderly woman committed, as she says, to doing her best for coming
generations. The ongoing detention and trial of Dmitry Reva on
charges which a prominent legal specialist has dismissed as
containing no crime, have demonstrated how the rot spreads in such
situations. Not only have the security
service,
the police, the prosecutor’s
office and
courts been guilty of serious infringements, but even the
state-controlled
UTV-1 has, in the absence of any evidence, been deployed
to convince viewers that Reva is a
terrorist. With Raisa Radchenko, the court’s refusal to allow an
independent psychiatric assessment suggests that it was aware of
failings in the assessment provided to get an elderly civic activist
into a psychiatric institution and “treated” with various
psychotropic drugs. Police officers’ behaviour in trying to put
pressure on Raisa Radchenko’s family shows similar complicity.
The hhief
psychiatrist claimed that Raisa Radchenko could pose a danger to
others. The real public danger, however, surely lies in the
corrupting effect when psychiatry, the courts, the police and even
television are deployed to silence dissenting voices and mislead the
public.
Halya Coynash is a member of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group
