Valery Shchukin: “Our prisons intended for humiliating treatment”

In recent years in Belarus the topic of total lawlessness in places of imprisonment is discussed rather often. Every year several hundreds of oppositionists get into detention facilities for so-called “sutki” (“days”) for alledged violation of public order.

The chairman of Brest branch of the Social-Democratic party Hanna Kanyus lodged a complaint to police for conditions in the remand prison. In particular, male guards watch female prisoners when they are taking a shower.

A political activist Valery Levaneuski who had organized a project ZoneBY.net, says in an interview to the Deutsche Welle that no articles of the Correctional Code in Belarus is respected as it should be: “Starting from food and everyday services; there are lice, dirt in wards; sanitary norms, exceeded limits for prisoners’ quantity… This enumeration could be endless”.

Valery Levaneuski has spent two years in prison for alleged libel for Lukashenka. When he got into prison, he continued the activities he was busy with at large. He was fighting with the regime defending human rights. Because of his actions Levaneuski was spending lots of time in the punitive isolation ward: “I appealed against elementary things. Prisoners are not given bread, though they are to receive 10 grammas of white bread a day. They started to give bread, but I was put into the punitive isolation ward two times before that”.

For expressing his political views the politician and journalist Valery Shchukin was sentenced to short terms numerous times. He also visited Western prisons on excursion: “I saw that in Germany they are trying to correct something, in the Czech Republic too. And in our country they do not even try to correct anything. Our prisons are intended for humiliating treatment”.

At the moment the leader of the project ZoneBY.net Levaneuski receives an avalanche of addresses from relatives of the imprisoned with requests for help. He believes that as the first step for improvement of the situation these addresses should be forwarded to the Penal Jurisdiction department of the Justice Ministry: “It turns out that police catches criminals, police imprisons them, and they are also those who guard and reform them. It is nonsense!”

“I am a person who knows laws, and to say the truth I had a shock in the first months because I had an impression that lawlessness originated from the administration of the prison,” Valery Levaneuski confessed.

As said by the politicians who had passed through prisons, to change the situation it is possible only by community efforts: “If there were at least 5-6 serious organisations in Belarus. I think it would be the first drop in solving this problem. Moreover, I would help them”.

They say, don't count out a prison cell, a begging bowl may come as well. But work in this sphere is also important because the problems of bullying prisoners, as Shchukin says, influence the whole society after prisoners are released.