IVANOV v. RUSSIA
Inadmissible
Branko Lubarda;Dmitry Dedov;Helen Keller;Helena Jäderblom;Johannes Silvis;Luis López Guerra;Pere Pastor Vilanova
1. The applicant, Mr Yevgeniy Viktorovich Ivanov, is a Russian national who was born in 1982 and lives in Moscow. He was represented before the Court by Mr M. I. Trepashkin, a lawyer practising in Moscow. 2. The Russian Government (“the Government”) were represented by Mr G. O. Matyushkin, Representative of the Russian Federation to the European Court of Human Rights. 3. The facts of the case, as submitted by the parties, may be summarised as follows. 4. In June 2009 the applicant, a former policeman, was committed to the Kapotnya detention centre (Следственный изолятор № 7 Капотня) on bribery charges. 5. The applicant was visited nine times by his lawyer before his release on 12 November 2009. During the visits, the applicant was locked inside a metal enclosure which he interchangeably called a partition or a cage, but which the Government called a partition. Two photographs of the visiting area taken by the lawyer, which were not disputed by the Government, show an empty room lit with fluorescent lights, with tiles on the floor and one wall. Against that wall stands an upright, three-sided enclosure about one and a half times a man’s height and 1 by 1.5 m at the base. Its panels are made of finger-thick iron rods crossing at right angles. Mounted on the centre panel is a door secured with a lock. There is a stool inside. 6. The applicant’s lawyer protested against this manner of detaining his client, but the prison guards justified their actions by saying that they were acting on the instructions of the prison governor. 7. Rules for prison visiting areas are regulated by the Ministry of Justice. The Regulations on Remand Prisons (Правила внутреннего распорядка следственных изоляторов уголовно-исполнительной системы, утверждены приказом Минюста РФ от 14 октября 2005 г. № 189) allow an inmate to meet his lawyer one-on-one, with no partition between them. A prison guard may supervise the meeting but may not listen to the participants (§ 145). 8. At the material time, Chapter 25 of the Code of Civil Procedure allowed for judicial review of the acts of executive authorities which impinged on individual rights (Article 254). A court also had the power to order the executive authority to remedy any breaches (Article 258).