The Committee for the Prevention of Torture (also known as the Committee Against Torture, or Pytkam.net) is a Nizhny Novgorod organization that provides legal support to people who have evidence of unlawful physical abuse committed against them.
The nature of the phenomenon
In practice, the Committee deals mainly with claims of torture applied by officers of the executive branch's "power" agencies against citizens, which makes it one of the more effective human-rights organizations. The Committee has repeatedly been designated a "foreign agent" by Russia's Ministry of Justice.
Example case of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture
On 2 May 2017 the European Court of Human Rights ruled on a complaint filed by human-rights defenders on behalf of Nikita Danishkin: he alleged that in 2010 he had been tortured by officers of the Center for Combating Extremism of the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (CCE). The Strasbourg judges established that Article 3 of the European Convention ("Prohibition of torture") had been violated in respect of Danishkin, and awarded him compensation in the amount of 20,000 euros.
According to Danishkin, the police officers failed to obtain a confession from him and took him to a temporary detention facility, but the duty officer, seeing the numerous bodily injuries Nikita had, sent him for a medical examination at City Hospital No. 40. On examination, doctors diagnosed Danishkin with bruises and contusions to the face.
Injuries were also recorded on the young man on 27 December 2010, when he was admitted to the pretrial detention center: "a red-brown bruise on the side of the abdomen on the right, a yellow-green bruise in the armpit area on the left, multiple purple bruises on the face and neck."
Following the beating, Danishkin filed a crime report with the Investigative Committee. However, no criminal case was ever opened, and the pre-investigation inquiry — during which investigator Novikov unlawfully issued five refusals to open a criminal case and which dragged on for more than a year and a half — concluded at the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Court on 5 August 2013, which ultimately upheld the investigator's sixth refusal as lawful.
On 2 May, a ruling was issued on the complaint filed on Danishkin's behalf. The Strasbourg judges unanimously found that:
- there had been a violation of Article 3 of the Convention in its substantive part (the applicant was subjected to torture);
- there had been a violation of Article 3 of the Convention on account of the lack of an effective investigation into the applicant's allegations of torture by police officers.
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Detainees who do not have procedural status are thereby denied the right to effective defense — for example, the right to have a lawyer present during questioning — which puts them in a vulnerable position and allows police officers to use impermissible methods of obtaining testimony. The European Court considers the practice of conducting interviews without a lawyer to be flawed. | 
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Curious fact
Unlike many human-rights defenders who in practice ignore the situation in Chechnya, Igor Kalyapin, the head of the Committee, kept the organization's Grozny office running (until it was set on fire) and was himself attacked in the republic after filing complaints with the prosecutor's office against its head.
Contacts
- Address: 96 "b" Osharskaya Street
- Phones: +7(831) 2161470, 2161471, 2161472, 2161473
- Committee's website