Kyrgyzstan: Ministry of Finance is trying to challenge the payment of compensation to a torture victim

The Jalal-Abad human rights organization “Justice” helped the Kyrgyz man to obtain compensation for torture by law enforcement officers. Now there are problems with its payment, the Ministry of Finance is trying to challenge it in court.

The Coalition Against Torture said to ACCA that this is a unique case in Kyrgyzstan, as the national judicial authorities first sided with the victim of torture, without waiting for a decision of the UN Human Rights Committee.

The 22-year-old resident of the city of Kerben in Ala-Bukinsky district, Maksatbek uulu Samarbek, came into the view of Kyrgyz law enforcement agencies in autumn of 2016. On the night of October 6-7, 2016, an auto parts store was robbed in Kerben. The owner of the store told police that 1 200 000 KGS were missing ($17 000).

In the course of operational actions under a bridge in Ala- Bukinsky district, about 60 km from the crime scene, law enforcement officers found documents and a surveillance camera that were taken from the store. The video from the camera was of poor quality, they could only see the silhouette of the robber.

Nevertheless, on the basis of these records, police concluded that Maksatbek uulu Samarbek was involved in the crime. Probably, the fact that the vulcanization, where the young man works, is located next to the robbed auto parts store, probably played a significant role in this.

When in the morning of October 14, 2016, operative officers of the police department came unexpectedly to vulcanization, the guy was working. He was brought into submission and without any sanctions was taken to the department.

There, they began knocking out confessions from Samarbek. According to the young man, he was not only severely beaten, they put a plastic bag on his head more than 15 times, put on a gas mask and threatened with a stun gun. The guy lost consciousness several times.

Note that torture is confirmed by a forensic report. In addition, a specialist in psychological and psychiatric examination also came to the conclusion that Samarbek did not lie when he claimed to have suffered from external physical influences.

According to him, six people participated in the “knocking out” of the confession. The seventh came later, he persuaded Samarbek to take the blame on himself.

In the end, the young man confessed to having done so that he would no longer be mocked. He told the investigators that he allegedly buried the stolen money on the plot near his grandmother’s house (mother of his father). The police, again without a search authorization, went to that place of the yard near the bathhouse, which Samarbek had pointed out. Attempts of police to find the “hidden” have led to nothing.

As a result, the guy’s relatives intervened in the situation. Samarbek’s father went with the police to the police department, demanding to prove the guilt of his son. Law enforcement authorities could not do this.

After the issue of initiating a criminal case became relevant. But it’s not with respect to Maksatbek uulu Samarbek, who, by the way, was never charged, but with regard to the police officers for torture.

Human rights activists helped Samarbek to defend his rightness. The lawyers of “Justice” contacted the Prosecutor’s office of Aksy district five times to institute criminal proceedings against six operative officers of the police department, but all attempts were unsuccessful.

Human rights defenders throughout this time were outraged by the fact that in Kyrgyzstan, in this case in the person of the Prosecutor’s office, the obligations to investigate torture under the UN Convention against Torture were not fulfilled. And also the standards of an effective investigation are not respected, which can be achieved only after the initiation of a criminal case.

However, the Aksy District court partially satisfied the claim of the torture victim. In October last year, the judicial bodies decided to pay the young man compensation in the amount of 50 000 KGS ($700) due to an ineffective investigation into his allegations of torture by the Prosecutor’s office of Aksy district.

According to the court, the Ministry of Finance of the Kyrgyz Republic should pay this amount of compensation to the victim of torture, Maksatbek uulu Samarbek. However, the department tried to challenge the court ruling in order not to pay to the victim.

The department has already lost two courts. The other day, the Jalal-Abad Regional court dismissed the appeal of the Ministry of Finance against the decision of the Aksy District court of October 29, 2019.

The lawyer of the Jalal-Abad human rights organization “Justice”, Sardor Abdukhalilov, told ACCA that this court decision has already entered into legal force and now human rights activists are seeking to enforce it.

“However, we do not exclude that the Ministry of Finance will again try to appeal the court’s decision, now in a supervisory procedure,” he explained.

It should be noted, according to the Coalition against Torture, for 9 months of 2019, 186 allegations of torture were registered in the Unified Register of Misconduct and Crimes (URMC). Based on 35 materials (from previous years), decisions to refuse to institute criminal proceedings were canceled and the materials were registered in the URMC. In total, 221 applications were registered for the indicated period. 60 of them were terminated, 1 was connected, 3 were sent to the court, and 157 were under investigation.