Children's rights

Boys in a pre-trial detention centre, visited by an Amnesty International delegate in1999 © AI

Fourteen-year-old Olga Mazalova was covered in bruises when she spoke to an Amnesty International delegate visiting Tomsk prison colony for girls in July 1999. She said she had been beaten by guards in an isolation punishment cell a few days earlier.

Tens of thousands of children in Russia are languishing behind bars even though the authorities are obliged, under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to ensure that the "arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child... shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time." Children are routinely held for months or even years in pre-trial detention and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for relatively minor offences.

In mid-2001 there were more than 17,000 children serving prison sentences in 64 special colonies for juveniles, according to the Justice Ministry. Many more are held in pre-trial detention facilities. The vast majority of those in prison are poor or were living on the streets. Already victims of economic hardship or domestic violence, they are usually picked up by police on suspicion of petty crimes such as theft. Anatoly Semenkov, for example, was 15 when he was sentenced by a court in Moscow in 1998 to five years' imprisonment for stealing a cigarette lighter.

Children who are detained are entitled to special protection based on the duty of the state to secure the best interests of the child. Yet children in Russian pre-trial detention centres are crammed into dirty, badly ventilated and vermin-infested cells.

Children are also entitled to special protection against torture and ill-treatment because their youth makes them particularly vulnerable to such abuse. Yet children are often interrogated by police after arrest without a lawyer or parent present. Amnesty International knows of a number of children who have been tortured or ill-treated in such circumstances. Children also suffer torture and ill-treatment in pre-trial detention centres and prisons. Those who abuse children’s rights are rarely held to account.

A radical rethinking of the juvenile justice system is needed to restore the presumption of liberty for children, to make juvenile detention centres places of care and rehabilitation, rather than places of cruelty and retribution, and to safeguard all children in custody from torture and ill-treatment, in line with Russia’s international legal obligations.

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