Shortcomings in medical care in Ukrainian prisons: the Logvinenko group of cases

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These cases mainly concern inhuman and/or degrading treatment due to overcrowding, poor material conditions and inadequate nutrition in police establishments, pre-trial detention centres and prisons, as well as during transportation by road or rail between detention facilities or to courts; inadequacy of medical care in general and for infectious diseases, drug addiction and physical disability in particular; and lack of effective preventive and compensatory remedies in all these respects (violations of Articles 3 and 13).

The latest developments on the case were presented by Gennadiy Tokarev, from Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. The recommendations from Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group as as follows:

  • to initiate, possibly in the form of a consensus conference, a transparent process for the transfer of prison medicine to the MoH, comprising a national debate involving all the actors concerned, including civil society and international organizations, to identify the main difficulties and the means of resolving them, and to define the main stages of the reform;

  • in any case to ask the State to provide, as soon as possible, an action plan containing a specific list of measures and steps to be taken to address the structural problems of access to health care in the prison system, with an indicative timetable

  • to enact promptly the regulation on the matter of providing medical care for detainee kept in the pretrial detention facilities

  • until transferring prison medicine to the MoH, to provide the compliance by the medical staff with provisions of regulations on the matter of providing medical care for prisoners, starting from securing for prisoners the real access of inmates to the medical personnel, and the due fixation of all medical records prescribed by law

  • to recommend to the State to extent a system of monitoring visits to the correctional institutions by public activists to the pretrial detention facilities, with necessary restrictions in communication of the monitors with the detainees

In addition, KHPG asks for the following procedural recommendations:

Logvinenko group (application No. 13448/07) of cases is:

(a)  to be kept under enhanced agenda

(b) to be examined again soon, perhaps in six months in the December CM/DH meeting