Regime of abuse: Police torture in Putin’s Russia

On 24 December 2015, a day after his 21st birthday, Artem Ponomarchuk did not come home from work.

Artem worked at a warehouse in Anapa, a Russian resort city on the Black Sea. Although it is an idyllic destination for families on holiday, it is also one of the most violent and corrupt regions of Russia.

Artem had been arrested by the notorious Anapa police and taken to the Criminal Investigation Department. A month earlier, some cigarettes had been stolen in an armed robbery. Unable to catch the criminals, Anapa police decided to pin the blame on Artem and three of his friends from the warehouse.

Held without charge and access to a lawyer, the four men were systematically tortured as they refused to confess to a crime for which they all had alibis.

"They brought me to the next room, hit my legs again, and again I fell," said Artem, in an interview filmed by Crew Against Torture, one of the oldest and last human rights organisations still working in Vladimir Putin's authoritarian Russia.

"My legs were tied with scotch. Two of them held me and put a gas mask on me, and someone else held my legs. 'Will you confess or will you not?' They continued to put pressure on my spine and beat me in the legs. They saw that I disagreed. They began to shove something metallic into my socks. I understood it was [electric] clamps."

Article 1 of the UN Convention Against Torture, whose 40th anniversary is this year and which Russia ratified in 1987, states: "For this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession […]".

Torture in Putin's Russia is so systematic police give it nicknames like yoga poses.

Torture methods like The Elephant and The Swallow have been documented in Russia by Amnesty International since the 1990s. Crew Against Torture, a member of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) and of the OMCT, produced a series of awareness-raising videos called 'Russian Yoga School' that demonstrate the different torture methods.

Many of the same methods were used on Artem and his three friends by the Anapa police. Crew Against Torture documented the case, providing the men and their families with rehabilitation and assistance in filing legal claims. The Torture included the rape of some of the men by the police, another systematic form of Torture in Russia used for blackmail.

Nine years after being tortured into confessing to a crime they could not have committed, the four men remain on trial. None of the police officers who tortured them have faced criminal sanctions. However, the courage of the men in speaking out and the persistence of lawyers and doctors at Crew Against Torture have achieved what many in Anapa thought impossible.

"I understand they had a production line: The police have a case, they find someone and start the process of putting them in jail," said Aram Arustamyan, one of the four torture survivors. "But after our case became known, our lawyer said he hadn't heard about such situations in Anapa. It turns out we stopped that production line […] It makes me feel better just knowing that, well, maybe many lives have been saved. If everyone had stayed quiet, how many more lives would they have ruined in those years? How many more innocent people would they have sent to prison?"

To learn more and support the work of Crew Against Torture in Russia, please visit www.pytkam.net/en.

The United Against Torture Consortium is an EU-funded project that pools the strengths and expertise of six international anti-torture organisations (IRCT, OMCT, REDRESS, Omega Research Foundation, APT and FIACAT) in partnership with over 200 civil society groups and other partners in 100+ countries to strengthen and expand torture prevention, protection, rehabilitation and strategic litigation.