“The apex of torture in Moldova was reached following the April 7 events,” president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights from Moldova Stefan Uratu told a news conference on June 23. The committee representatives say they receive 5-6 petitions weekly from detainees complaining about being tortured in prisons, Info-Prim Neo reports. “The situation keeps worsening these years, especially after the Execution Code was modified in 2006 allowing the prison guards more freedom in terms of access to penitentiaries. It's more difficult for the Committee members to enter the prisons, than it was when the prisons were subordinated to the Internal Affairs Ministry,” Stefan Uratu added. He says there are cases when the inmates are beaten for complaining to the guards' superiors, for asking for food or for the fact that their relatives keep asking courts for justice. “There is a case pending at the Appellate Court in which two brothers were cruelly beaten because there mother asks the courts for justice for them,” said the Helsinki Committee president. “It's the officials who apply torture most often: detectives, prosecutors, employees of the Penitentiaries Department, of the Service of Information and Security, or at requests of those officers,” said Teo Carnat, the Committee's executive manager. “The tortured person is in impossibility to defend oneself, because the torturer has got the law in his hands, has weapons and is protected by the state bodies. As the saying goes: hawks will not pick hawks' eyes out,” Carnat says. On the occasion of the UN international day supporting the victims of torture, marked on June 26, the Helsinki Committee organizes the Anti-Torture week, with scores of events planned, including flash-mobs. Stefan Uratu runs for a seat in the parliament on the Liberal Party's list, on position 22. He ran as an independent candidate in the April 5 elections.