Russian human rights official wants to know if guard was joking when he pointed out ‘the torture room’ during prison tour

Buryatia’s human rights commissioner, Yulia Zhambalova, would like to know more about the cell described to her during a recent prison tour as “the torture room.” Zhambalova has filed formal requests with the district attorney’s office and the local branch of the Federal Penitentiary Service, asking for more information about the mysterious room at Correctional Facility No. 2 in Ulan-Ude. During her inspection of the prison, she says a guard pointed to an empty cell and said it was for torturing inmates. Without any explanation, the guard later vanished from the tour, and the deputy warden suggested that he’d suddenly left on vacation. Other prison staff reportedly told Zhambalova that the remark about a torture room was only a joke.

What’s so special about a “joke”?

Russian prisons are notoriously rough, but the public has been especially conscious of the prison system’s human rights abuses in the wake of multiple torture scandals. In July, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta sparked the current wave of publicity by leaking video footage of more than a dozen guards beating an inmate in Yaroslavl. In mid-August, Meduza counted more than 50 reported cases of torture by Russian prison and law enforcement officials — all within the past eight months.

Most recently, on August 30, federal investigators in Belgorod opened a criminal case, following media reports about the torture of three inmates at a prison in Valuyki. What Zhambalova overheard may well have been a joke, but her concerns are not without merit.