Yesterday, on 16 February 2021, judge of the Oktyabrsky District Court of Krasnodar Elena Baranova dismissed the claim of Evgeny Bounin from the Tuapse district who requested a compensation of moral damage for ineffective investigation of his complaint about torture of at the police department in November 2018. During the investigation, the criminal case on tortures was dismissed at least six times, and each time the investigators came to conclusion that no one was beating up Mr Bounin at the police department.
As we have previously reported, in November 2018, Evgeny Bounin from Indyuk settlement of the Tuapse region applied to the Committee Against Torture for legal assistance. He told that on 12 November he was summoned for a conversation at the police department, located on Mira Street in Tuapse: there, in one of the offices of the criminal investigations department, one of the officers handcuffed him and demanded that he wrote a full confession of a phone theft.
“I said I was not involved in this. After that the police officer started to hit me on the head with first and palms of his hands. The pulled the hood of my coat on my head and after several blows my nose started to bleed and there appeared a pool of blood on the floor”, – Bounin recalls.
According to Evgeniy, the police officer, who strongly smelled of alcohol, threatened him that the battery would last for the whole night and as a result he would still be apprehended as a suspect.
“Having concerns for my health, I wrote the required confession at the dictation of another criminal investigations officer”, – Bounin continues.
According to Evgeniy, at the police department he was offered some vodka, after that the police officers brought him home in their vehicle, and on the road he continued to drink vodka with the police officer who had beaten him up.
In the morning of the next day, Bounin called an ambulance team to his house, and was put to Tuapse District Hospital No.1. There Evgeniy was diagnosed with: “Closed craniocerebral injury, brain concussion, extravasation of soft tissues of the right periorbital area, contusion of soft tissues of the occipital region”.
On the same day, 13 November, Evgeniy’s sister applied to the Investigative Committee with a crime report. According to Bounin, a forensic scientist came to his hospital immediately; he photographed and registered his bodily injuries.
The criminal case under elements of crime provided by items “a”, “b” in Part 3 of Article 286 of the Criminal Code of the RF (“abuse of office using violence and special equipment”) was initiated only on 16 April 2019.
In the course of the investigation, the criminal case was dismissed six times. When dismissing the criminal case, the investigators every time came to the conclusion that no one beat up Bounin at the police department. At the present time, the case is once again dismissed. Human rights defenders intend to appeal against this ruling of the investigators.
In August 2020, lawyers with the Committee Against Torture applied to court in the interests of Mr Bounin with a lawsuit to collect from the Investigative Committee a compensation for moral damage inflicted to him by ineffective investigation of the torture case. Claims under the lawsuit amounted to eight hundred thousand rubles.
Among other things, to justify the lawsuit, human rights defenders pointed out that for over a year they could not carry out the instructions of the Prosecutor and the superiors of the Investigative Department on conducting the specific investigative activities.
The representative of the Investigative Committee, opposing to satisfying of the lawsuit, brought in the arguments that the investigators’ inaction was not declared illegal by the criminal law of procedure.
Yesterday, judge of the Oktyabrsky District Court of Krasnodar Elena Baranova dismissed the lawsuit.
“We, definitely, do not agree with this ruling and will be appealing against it after receiving the reasons for judgment”, – lawyer with the Committee Against Torture Roman Veretennikov comments.