The Republic of Mari-El. The decision of the Yoshkar-Ola City Court concerning compensation to Mikhail Tulovchikov, a victim of ill-treatment by police, in the amount of 20 thousand rubles to be paid by the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Mari-El has entered into force.

    You may remember that on the night from 17 to 18 May 2004 Mikhail Tulovchikov and Evgeny Abrosimov were waiting for their friend in the car when suddenly policemen came up to them and charged them with being guards of an unauthorized car park. The policemen asked the young men to get out of the car and then a baseball bat, found in the car, was put into use perhaps as a preventive measure. The law enforcers took the young men to the police station of Zarechny District, beating them all their way. In the police station the young men were handcuffed to the window bars and were taken one by one to a separate room for an interview in private, which only added new bruises on their bodies. The policemen wanted them to confess to an administrative offence.

    The Yoshkar-Ola Human Rights NGO Man and Law together with the Public Verdict Foundation and the NN Committee Against Torture carried out a public investigation into unlawful actions of the policemen and made every effort to have the offenders fairly sentenced by the decision of the Yoshkar-Ola City Court. Senior lieutenant Nikolay Zhuravlev and captain Vladimir Popov were sentenced respectively to eleven and a half and twelve and a half years’ imprisonment in a high-security colony, and senior lieutenant Dmitry Konev was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment on probation.   

    “Human rights defenders, on the one hand, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, on the other, benefit when the system gets rid of such policemen. We, as human rights defenders, have to minimize the number of cases of cruel treatment in law enforcement agencies, and, if such a case does happen, make every effort to restore justice”, says Dmitry Egorshin, an expert of the Public Investigation Department of the Yoshkar-Ola Human Rights NGO Man and Law, and a representative of Mikhail Tulovchikov in his civil suit. “We are pleased with the decision of the Yoshkar-Ola City Court, but the case is not over yet. In the nearest future we are going to make another claim for compensation for non-pecuniary damage. You should remember there is another victim under this case – Evgeny Abrosimov. He is currently in the army but when he returns he will claim for compensation. Only then we’ll be able say that the case is over”, he added.