The Systemic Effect of Pussy Riot The author is a Doctor of Law and member of the Russian Federation Presidential Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights. Pussy Riots act in the Christ the Savior Cathedral has become a litmus test almost as powerful as Putins act to incorporate Crimea This week news came that a couple named the Kulagins have been fired from the Federal Corrections Administration (known by its Russian abbreviation, FSIN) for Mordovia, known since Stalins time as the Dubravlag. The husband, Aleksandr, long served as the head of Prison Colony 14, in which Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot served her time, while his wife Svetlana worked as deputy director for corrective labor in Mordovias prisons agency. Svetlana Kulagina was one of the most influential individuals in this state within a state, home to around 25,000 convict laborers. Prisoners see a direct connection between the firing of the Kulagins and the actions of Tolokonnikova and her attorneys. This spring, General Oleg Simchenkov, head of Mordovias corrections administration, also left his post. It had fallen to Simchenkov to host countless delegations of agency overseers throughout the previous fall and winter. Inspections by the national prosecutors office, the Russian labor administration, the FSIN central office, and the presidential council on human rights kept the prisons director busy. Soon it will have been one year since Tolokonnikova published online a letter about everyday life in prison, describing the morals and medieval working conditions in the womens colony where she served her time: the 16 or 18-hour workday, night shifts, no weekends or holidays, no equipment repairs or medical aid, all for a few hundred rubles a month (about ten dollars). An entire life dedicated to the so-called baseline, the daily quota for putting out dozens of jackets for police uniforms, with beatings and bullying for anyone unable to meet that quota. The letter had the impact of an exploding bomb. Viewed over a million times, it forced the prisons agency first to try to cover up the information, and later to completely isolate Tolokonnikova from the outside world, letting neither her family nor her attorneys in to see her. The last time a Russian prisoner set off a chain reaction like this one, leading to systemic change, was when Anatoly Marchenko died of a hunger strike in a prison in Chistopolye in 1986. Marchenko had demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev free all political prisoners in the USSR. Now Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova have had the same kind of impact in just a year in prison. Four UN special rapporteurs — for contemporary forms of slavery, illegal detention, freedom of expression, and cultural rights — demanded explanations from Sergei Lavrovs Ministry of Internal Affairs. Human rights officials Vladimir Lukin and Mikhail Fedotov started calling the FSIN practically on a daily basis, worried about what had become of 23-year-old Tolokonnikova. Now, one year later, we can start to assess how the system has responded to this extremely well-targeted attack. The Ministry of Justice has resurrected the idea of prison reform, which had been launched under previous FSIN director Aleksandr Reymer, but then dropped when he was swept out of office by a corruption scandal. Even before the women from Pussy Riot were released under an amnesty declared by President Vladimir Putin, the FSIN had announced that it intended to make real changes to how convicts were paid for their labor, increasing their wages significantly. The idea was launched of creating an FSIN commercial shop and eliminating the thick layer of middlemen that has long corrupted that system. Other convicts at Colony 14, with whom Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina still keep in touch now that they have been released, confirm that they are no longer forced to work on weekends, although decent working conditions remain a far-off ideal. The next legal steps planned by Pussy Riot and their attorneys are targeted at just this sort of systemic change. A case in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, accepted by that court this January and currently in a stage of intensive correspondence between the Court and the Russian Justice Ministry, concerns the degrading conditions in which Russian defendants are transported in police vehicles from pre-trial detention facilities to their hearings in court. Half a square meter per person, no ventilation, for 15-20 people in a metal van, 85° in the summer and 20° below zero in the winter, for four or five hours at a time with no food, water or toilet, every day: those are the conditions the defendants in the Bolotnaya Square protests case have been enduring for an entire year now. This is the second year of that routine for Daniil Konstantinov, who has already collapsed in court several times, and for thousands of other detainees. The ECHR is expected to render a verdict on the Pussy Riot case in the next six months. If the Court declares Russian prison transport vans inhumane, there will be a basis for making widespread changes in that process. One other item in Tolokonnikova and Alyokhinas complaint to Strasbourg also has to do with human dignity: the shameful glass-walled cages known as aquariums and the police dogs chained up near them in Russian courts. This summer, the ECHR handed down a ruling declaring the metal cages in which defendants are held in Russian courts a violation of the Convention on Human Rights. They give the public an impression that the person seated inside the cage is guilty even before the court renders a verdict. Holding a defendant in a cage is permissible only in those very rare cases in which he presents a genuine threat to the people present at the trial. That is an indication of just how foreign European human rights standards are to the average Russian. Also awaiting consideration is the main charge against Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina: jail time for expressing a political position. The Russian Constitutional Court has agreed to hear Tolokonnikovas complaint regarding the Criminal Code article on hooliganism. Her complaint states that in the past five years or so, the hooliganism law has been applied as punishment for anyone using art to criticize the authorities: the group Voina (or War), Greenpeace, the artist Pyotr Pavlensky, and anti-fascist artists. That court, chaired by Valery Zorkin, may take its usual conformist approach, but even if it finds nothing terrible about jail time for those criticizing the political authorities, his fellow judges in Strasbourg are quite likely to have a different opinion. Their decision on the Pussy Riot case may turn out to be even more sensitive for the Russian authorities than the Yukos case, since it will again raise the question of whether Russia adheres to European human rights values. If not, we will have to admit that prison time for criticizing the supreme ruler is simply one of Russias traditional values. But the most valuable systemic influence exerted by Pussy Riot is that the act these young women committed in the Christ the Savior Cathedral has become a litmus test almost as powerful as Putins act to incorporate Crimea. Events like these wake the public up, trigger genuine emotions, provide an outlet for social energy, make us reconsider our values, and stimulate public discussion. Pussy Riot is showing us how to act on the system. Theirs is an example worth imitating. Translation provided by FairVega Translations. vedomosti.ru/opinion/news/32226091/sistemnyj-effekt-pussy-riot#ixzz3AnVXNjTR
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 09:49:03 +0000
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