The official probe into the April 2009 events and the mildness of the punishments received by police officers involved in ill-treatment cases as a result were not commensurate with the scale and gravity of abuses faced by peaceful demonstrators a decade ago. This has instilled into the victims a sense that justice is inaccessible along with a sense of helplessness against impunity. These are some of the conclusions of a report presented today by Amnesty International Moldova, which recommends that Moldova should create a specialized agency to investigate torture and inhumane treatment at the hands of law enforcement.
The study, conducted by a foreign Amnesty International researcher following a visit to Moldova in February, shows that some steps have been taken to combat torture, ill-treatment and impunity in the decade after the April 2009 events. Still, they only create a false perception of justice, as problems prevail.
AIM president Veronica Mihailov-Moraru noted that, while some legislative amendments were made in 2012 to protect victims of torture, coupled with training courses among stakeholders to prevent such cases from repeating themselves, the system overall hasn’t been changed. The relatively recent case of Andrei Braguța’s death while in custody is a telling example.
In the case of Andrei Braguța, whose detention exacerbated his mental health issues, ill-treatments persisted throughout his time in custody, from his arrest, to his placement in a shared cell, to the failure to be provided with adequate medical care. In another case, the businessman Serghei Cosovan has been remanded in the Pruncul Prison since September 2017 despite being in poor health, and the administration refuses to transfer him to a hospital in disregard of doctors’ recommendations.
Ion Guzun, of the Legal Resource Center, said that, a decade after the April 2009 events, things haven’t improved much or even regressed as concerns detention conditions, provision of medical care and ill-treatment in the prison system.
Ludmila Popovici, executive director of the “Memoria” Center, said that some little steps were taken to shed light on the April 2009 events, but no serious measures were put into practice to make amends for the victims and to guarantee that such things never happen again.
According to the AIM report, in the aftermath of the April 2009 protests, the police held at least 600 persons, many of them ill-treated during detention in police stations. The Prosecutor General’s Office recorded 108 complaints then. Amnesty recalls that in 2015 the PGO issued a press release to sum up the probe: 71 separate criminal cases were initiated which eventually resulted in 29 police officers being sentenced. Since then, all relevant criminal proceedings have been terminated, and as of 31 December 2018, there weren’t any relevant court proceedings. Bottom line, only one officer received an actual prison sentence for his role in the manslaughter of a protester, but he fled from justice before he could be jailed, and the rest received only suspended sentences.