The events related to Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s hunger strike caused us to release this statement of the participants of the Common Action initiative group before we collected signatures of other human rights activists. Human rights activists demand that the Russian authorities dismiss the Federal Service for the Implementation of Punishment (FSIN) head Yury Kalinin and that the General Prosecutor investigate the violation of the law by his department. The events of recent days make us pose a question about the personal responsibility of Yury Kalinin over the legal violations committed by him and his employees. These include:

1. Another very dangerous provocation has been committed towards political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The attacker of Khodorkovsky has been defiantly given no punishment while Khodorkovsky has been illegally placed into a single cell, which is a type of disciplinary punishment. The employees of the FSIN distributed offensive insinuations, hid the truth about the degree of injuries sustained by Khodorkovsky and lied by saying that he was placed into comfortable conditions and not in a single cell.

2. Seriously ill political prisoner Mikhail Trepashkin has been refused medical treatment in a city hospital on several occasions and under various pretexts. With a number of provocations and staged “violations,” the administration of the colony created a pretext for appealing to court and asking to transfer Trepashkin to common regime with harder conditions. Trepashkin, the father of a large family, was sent to a colony located over 2,000 km from the place of his residence, to the city of Nizhny Tagil. This city’s ecological condition is dangerous for Trepashkin, who suffers from asthma.

3. Inmates [in Russian prisons] are systematically banned from meeting their lawyers. They became the victims of criminal actions committed by the administrations of the colonies. In the latest example, dozens of inmates in the Mordovian colonies who protested against dangerous work conditions and the illegal actions of the members of the “sections of discipline and order” were cruelly beaten and deported to “medical” colony LIU-19 in the Yavas settlement. There they were placed into punitive cells and “zindan,” holes in the ground closed by panels. Then inmates were secretly sent off to other colonies, including those in remote areas. Previously, inmates from Ligov city who appealed against the procuracy were also secretly sent off to other colonies.

Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, as well as Justice Minister Yuri Chaika (whose ministry controls the FSIN), acknowledge the fact that the management policy for the FSIN is the reason for the crude violations of the inmates’ rights.

We demand that the Russian General Procuracy investigate the actions of the Federal Service for the Implementation of Punishment mentioned above.

We also demand that the President of the Russian Federation immediately dismiss General Kalinin.

Signed:

M.Artuinov, International Assembly for Human Rights

L. Ponomarev, All Russia Movement For Human Rights

V. Oivin, Glasnost Fund

L. Vakhnina, human rights activist

S. Sorokin, Movement Against Violence

Y. Samodurov, Andrey Sakharov Museum and Public Center

E. Chernyi, Ecology and Human Rights Coalition

Priest Yakunin, Committee for Defence of Freedom and Conscience