Rape and torture in prison: the poignant testimony of a Russian whistleblower
The whistleblower Sergei Savelev had access to images of rape and torture perpetrated in Russian prisons.
© Dennis Strelkov / RFI
Text by: Daniel Vallot Follow
6 mins
For several years, Sergeï Savelev had access to unbearable images of rape and torture perpetrated in Russian prisons.
Images that this former Belarusian detainee, now aged 31, was able to collect, keep, and make public after his release from prison last February.
Now on the run, Sergeï Savelev is now in France, where he is seeking political asylum.
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These are images of rare violence: rapes, beatings, acts of torture perpetrated on detainees by other detainees.
These images were made public by Sergei Savelev, arrested in 2013 for a narcotics case which he denies, and detained until last February in Saratov prison.
Of Belarusian nationality, Sergeï Savelev is a computer scientist by profession, which leads the prison administration to use his skills.
►Also read: Russia opens an investigation after revelations about rapes in prison
“
My job was to process the video files and manage the equipment
,” says the whistleblower, seated on the terrace of a hotel near Roissy.
I gave small cameras to inmates who were assigned to me.
Then, I recovered the videos and I waited for the orders: either I deleted them or I copied them on a USB key that I took to a superior.
"
Sergei Savelev, held no importance in the eyes of the prison administration, is at the heart of a system of violence and blackmail particularly sordid.
"Prison Kompromat"
In front of the computer where he downloads the videos shot by the detainees, he watches hours and hours of images of rape, physical torture and humiliation. "
This violence is perpetrated at the request of the administration to put pressure on the victims
"
,
explains Vladimir Ossetchkine, director of the NGO Gulagu.net, specializing in the denunciation of crimes committed in Russian prisons.
According to the NGO, these videos made with the material of the prison administration can then be used as a means of blackmail, inside and outside the prison.
A repressive system with a twofold objective: extracting confessions during torture sessions, and threatening the dissemination of videos to ensure the victims' silence or cooperation.
In a Russian prison, the fact of having been raped by other prisoners is the worst situation: the victim is therefore considered an outcast, on whom all kinds of humiliation and abuse can be imposed.
"
Explode the truth
"
This inhuman system of prison repression had already been documented by several NGOs defending the rights of prisoners, including Gulagu.net. But only through testimonies from former detainees, through complaints lodged with the Russian courts - most of them going unheeded, and at best through poor quality recordings taken on cell phones. This time, the images are of much better quality, as the video material was provided by the prison administration itself. And their number exceeds anything that has been able to be revealed so far: a thousand videos from Saratov prison, but also from other places of detention in Russia through the prison administration server to which the computer scientist was able to gain access.
“
Everyone knows that these things take place in prisons in Russia,
slips Sergei Savelev.
Everyone talks about the torture, the violence, the murders, everyone talks about it, but no one has seen it and the authorities continue to pretend that everything is normal.
When I realized that I had proof of what was going on, I said to myself that I absolutely had to unravel the truth.
"
Request for political asylum
Outsmarting the administration's surveillance, the computer scientist first manages to store the images, then get them out of prison when he is released last February. Hoping that other detainees will also manage, in the future, to "
get out
" video evidence of this violence, he refuses to explain to us in detail the method used. “
Let's say I know the system very well, and from the moment I considered taking that risk, and releasing the footage, I was well prepared. When I was released from prison I was searched four times, but I succeeded.
"
In the months following his release, the former detainee manages to make the images public with the help of Vladimir Ossechkin, causing an unprecedented scandal in Russia. Several officials of Saratov prison are sacked, and the Kremlin is even grappling with the issue - "
an investigation will take place if the authenticity of these images is confirmed,
"
Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson for Russian media, told Russian media. the Russian Presidency. Fearing for his safety, the computer scientist has meanwhile fled the country - traveling to Belarus by taking a bus that takes him to Minsk. From there, he flew to Turkey, then Tunisia… before returning to Minsk via Paris. His journey ended there: it was during this stopover in Roissy, on October 15, that he applied for political asylum.
Risk of retaliation
Authorized to enter French territory, he will now have to wait several months for a response from Ofpra, the French administration responsible for validating asylum requests.
"
I feel safe in France, in any case much more than in Russia or Belarus,
"
replies the whistleblower when asked about possible reprisals against him.
But his lawyer and Vladimir Ossetchkine are much less optimistic.
"
I think the Russian intelligence services will want revenge on him,"
worries the director of Gulagu.net, himself a refugee in France since 2016. "
We are going to ask the French authorities for additional protection measures. And of course, our team is doing everything to protect it. Our first protection is media exposure: by providing the media with the video files he managed to release, we will no longer be the only ones to hold them, and we will be less important in the eyes of the Russian services.
"
For Vladimir Ossetchkine, the videos exfiltrated by the whistleblower constitute an absolutely essential mass of evidence to denounce the repressive system put in place by the Russian prison administration. “
For years, we have collected and published poignant testimonies, but each time the authorities discarded, claimed that nothing was confirmed. Seeing the work we were doing on violence in prison, Sergei realized that we lacked proof, and he, this proof, he had it! His images are the element that we lacked to dismantle the cogs of this criminal machine, just like the responsibility of the Russian security services and that of the prison administration.
"
► To read also
: Russia: a video of torture of a prisoner by guards revealed
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