CASE OF SAYEROV v. RUSSIA
Violation of Article 3 - Prohibition of torture (Article 3 - Degrading treatment;Inhuman treatment) (Substantive aspect)
Branko Lubarda;Georgios A. Serghides;Pere Pastor Vilanova
4. The applicant was born in 1963 and is currently serving his term of imprisonment in Nizhniy Tagil. 5. Since 12 June 2011 the applicant waited trial in remand prison IZ21/2 in the Republic of Chuvashiya. According to him, between 15 June 2011 and 15 April 2012 he was transported by prison van on approximately one hundred occasions between the remand prison and temporary detention facility of Cheboksary (IVS) which was the closest secure facility to the court building. Although on some rare occasions the applicant was alone in the van, during other trips he was either placed in a single occupancy cell measuring 0.25 sq. m or remained on his feet because there were no free seats. There were no toilets in the vans, prisoners used plastic bottles. On the days of transport, the applicant did not receive food rations. Lengthy check-in and check-out procedures resulted in two-hour wait at either facility with inmates staying inside vans. The applicant submitted a certificate issued by the remand prison governor showing the dates of his transport. 6. The Government provided a description of the applicant’s conditions of transport, relying on transport logs concerning fifty-five trips, photographs of the vans, and two certificates issued by the Ministry of Interior of the Republic. One of the certificates lacked references to any original documentation and mentioned fifty-five trips and the one referred to “extracts from the prisoner transport logs” and listed sixty-six trips on different dates. The Government stated that they could not provide the full information about the conditions of the applicant’s transport. They added that the applicant was transported on fifty-five occasions in total, on thirteen of which he was in the van alone. The number of prisoners did not exceed the maximum capacity of vans, an average trip lasted 35-40 minutes, some of the vans were equipped with toilets, and the applicant was provided with dry food rations.