Commentary by Andrey Borodin: This is a curious confession by the general prosecutor of the Russian Federation. If he is citing such information, then the problem is too obvious and the real scale of the disaster may be greater by a factor of 10.
More than 4,600 persons have been unlawfully detained or arrested in Russia over the past three years. The RIA Novosti news agency reports on 12 February that the information has been provided by general prosecutor Yuri Chaika. “People have been in detention for years,” the head of the overseeing department said.
A total of 14,261 persons have been unlawfully made criminally liable over the three years. The general prosecutor did not elaborate if the people have been lucky enough to see their cases thrown out. Nor did he say if the law-enforcement officers who opened the cases have been punished.
During the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, law-enforcement agencies took measures to reduce the number of those arrested. Those measures included a ban on taking into custody businessmen on economic charges.
According to statistics of the Federal Sentence Execution Service (FSIN), Russian pre-trial detention centres held 113,000 persons as of 1 February 2014.