There's a troubling tendency of making prisoners' life in Russian-occupied Crimea tougher than it currently is. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group turned their attention to the bills that recently took force in Russia.
'Three new Russian laws, recently signed into force by Russian President Vladimir Putin, will make imprisonment for the ever-mounting number of Crimean and other Ukrainian political prisoners convicted of so-called ‘extremism’ or ‘terrorism’ even harsher. The conditions that the men are held in now are already equivalent to torture and are in several cases putting their lives in danger'.
'The package of three laws was signed by Putin on 27 December 2018, after being put forward by deputies from the ruling ‘United Russia’ party only a month earlier. The amendments introduced in the three laws mean that people convicted of something called ‘public calls to terrorism, its public justification or propaganda’ will have to serve a part of their sentence in a prison where the conditions are significantly worse than in the normal ‘corrective colony', reads the story.
Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group also mentioned cases of two Ukrainian political prisoners, Nariman Memedeminov and Yevhen Karakashev.
'Men convicted of alleged involvement in Hizb ut-Tahrir, or, officially, under Article 205.5, of ‘organizing or taking part in the activities of a terrorist organization’, will have to spend at least a year in a prison, not a prison colony, after sentence is passed. This is regardless of how long (how many years in most cases) a person has already spent in SIZO [remand prison] where the conditions are shocking and tantamount to torture', the story goes on.
