Lawyer of the Committee for Prevention of Torture Albina Mudarisova: «As a lawyer and a human rights defender in my work I come across a lot of violations committed by law-enforcement authorities’ representatives. And I thought that no violation can surprise me, since I have seen plenty of them. It is well-known that investigators often issue repeated refusals to initiate criminal proceedings even when the fact of the crime is obvious. Sometimes a person complains of the police torture, and the investigator issues a refusal to initiate criminal proceedings and sends the material for decision-making to the same police department where the victim was tortured. Or, for example, you apply to investigation authorities with a crime report, and they refuse to even register your crime report, treating it as an application. And it goes without saying that the investigative bodies’ representatives do not consider it necessary to notify the interested parties about the procedural decisions that they take. But it is the first time in my experience that the material of the check is lost – and I’m sure the Orenburg branch of the Committee for Prevention of Torture has not come across such cases before, either.
 

(Albina Mudarisova)

It all started with a complaint that I submitted against the refusal of the investigator to initiate criminal proceedings based on Vladimir Arkhipov’s report, in which he informed that he had been beaten by Road Patrol Service officers in August 2011 (we wrote about this case). Instead of five days (the period stipulated by the Criminal and Procedural Code of the RF, the court was examining the complaint during two months. The reason for that was that the investigative authorities were persistently failing to provide the material of the check. As a result the court satisfied the complaint and declared the investigator’s refusal to initiate criminal proceedings to be illegal, based on the documents which I provided. In addition, the court issued a special ruling with regard to Head of the Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee of the RF for the Orenburg region Sergey Kolotov, which stated that such violations are not acceptable in future.

The court ruling has entered into legal force, but there is little use in that. The head of the Investigative Department never performed the duty which the court assigned him to. Again I applied to the court with a complaint about non-performance of the previous court ruling. Again instead of five days (period according to the law), the complaint was being examined for over a month and again the reason for such delay was that the investigative authorities were not providing the material of the check. I started to doubt that the investigative authorities were going to provide it at all. And at the next court session the investigator confessed that the material of the check is lost (!!!) and asks the court to postpone the court hearing for recovering the material. The court satisfied his request, however, on the scheduled date no representative of the Investigative Department showed up and the material was never provided. Well, negligence of the head of the Investigative Department is obvious – his subordinates lost the material, on which the investigators were working for several years, albeit poorly. Now I think I will apply to the Investigative Department with a crime report under part 1 Article 293 of the Criminal Code of the RF with regard to the head of the Investigative Department, who is so negligent to his office duties».