NEWS

By Anna Arutunyan

Returning home from a stressful day at work, Zhenya, an interior designer in his 30s, had some beer before dropping by a supermarket in central Moscow to pick up another can for himself and a bottle of liqueur for his wife.

"I was a bit drunk, and I forgot to get a grocery basket," he said. "At the checkout, I put the can of beer in my pocket to get my wallet out."

When the supermarket's security guard approached him and accused him of shoplifting, Zhenya admitted that he had forgotten about the beer in his pocket, but had intended to pay for it.

When he asked if he could pay for the beer in the store, he was instead taken to the local police precinct. There, he claims, he was beaten up by four or five officers until he was unconscious.

Police only called an ambulance when Zhenya stopped breathing. With broken ribs, a punctured lung and head injuries, he was taken to a hospital only after doctors complained to police officers that his life was in danger.

"Before I was taken away, the police said that it would be worse if I told anyone," said Zhenya, who asked that his real name not be used for this article, for fear of reprisals.

Nearly three years after the incident, a court dropped charges of shoplifting against Zhenya. Yet a criminal case into the beating has still not been instigated.

According to Zhenya and Public Verdict, a human rights organisation that documents allegations of police brutality, investigators re­fused to launch a case against police officers, despite a court ruling twice that investigators were obliged to do so.

Investigators are now claiming that they have lost all the case materials. Activists at Public Verdict say they will push further, but admit that as with dozens of similar cases, it will be an uphill battle.

While Zhenya's case is depressingly all-too-familiar to human rights campaigners, top brass at the Interior Ministry have decided to look at the problems of police brutality, corruption and abuse of power from a different angle. Maybe, they asked themselves, it's not justice that is to blame, but lack of ethics among new recruits joining the police.

In an effort to get the police to clean up their act, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev approved an ethics code last month that all officers are required to observe.

The code, which runs to seven chapters and 28 articles, refers to everything from how a police officer should talk to a suspect to how many tea-cups he should keep on his desk. The ethical Interior Ministry official should "avoid consuming alcoholic drinks during and the night before being on duty; smoking in public places ... and casual sexual affairs," the code says.

Given the stark clash between the image presented in the code and the real-life Russian police officer - whose average official salary is 16,000 roubles ($450) per month, it was no wonder that human rights organisations  pounced on what they saw as an amusing PR stunt.

But Interior Ministry officials insist that the code is a serious attempt to deal with serious problems, which they acknowledge are widespread.

Article 9, for instance, describes how an officer must explain to a potential suspect "in a tactical form why he is being addressed by the police officer; explain to the violator what he has done without lecturing, in a kind, clear and convincing fashion, with a citation of the appropriate laws."

Interior Ministry officials said the code would be obligatory study by the end of the year. Every new recruit must accept the new code in written form before he joins, while students in police academies will study the code as part of their training. Commissions, which were set up last year, will investigate every complaint about a violation of the ethics code on an individual basis.

Violators will be disciplined, Tatyana Kolganova, a spokeswoman for the Interior Minist­ry's recruitment department said. "If an officer was rude, a citizen can use an article of the code." The best way to proceed is to complain to the direct supervisor of the officer in question and cite the code, she said.

The chief motive of the code is instilling a sense of civic duty in officers - something that they have often lacked, one of the code's authors said.

"Our ministry primarily based its decision on the need to protect citizens and maintain law and order," said police colonel Alexander Sheg­lov, who heads the Moscow Interior Ministry University department on professional ethics.

For more than three years now, the department has been developing an ethics code based on the European Code of Police Ethics and other international documents. "We based our work on fundamental social values and the expectations in society of how an upstanding Interior Ministry officer should act."

Like Kolganova, Sheglov does not believe that the code is a solution to the kind of behaviour that can be encountered all too frequently among police officers. "We would be mistaken if we decided that things will change in the short term," he said. "We need time. But we also need a unified vision. Another aim is fostering an individual morality in the officer."

Human rights groups who deal with police violations on a regular basis gave a mixed response to the code.

"This is a critical case," said Boris Pustyntsev, head of the St. Peters­burg-based Citizens' Watch organisation. "This document is posturing. A police captain I know who deals with hate crimes said that officers will not be able to carry out the demands of the code."

The main reason, says Pustyntsev, is the inherent army-style structure in the police force.

"What kind of ethics code are you going to have in the army?" he said. "Everything is based on carrying out orders from a superior and not questioning them. You can have a nominal code, but you cannot act on it. And that's why it won't work in our police. Any reform should start with demilitarisation of the force."

Sergei Nikitin, head of Amnesty International in Moscow, said that the code repeated a lot of existing legislation. "But it's a good thing that it exists, it would be worse without it," he said. Although Interior Ministry officials point to the duty of the police officer to protect civil rights, Nikitin says this duty is not prominent in the code.

"It should be in the introduction," he said. Nikitin added that high-placed officials in the Interior Ministry are keen to cooperate with rights groups, and said that he brought up the need to focus on the duty of protecting human rights at a meeting last year with Nurgaliyev. "But there are not enough people" in the ministry who are willing to cooperate, Nikitin said.

While Nikitin said he saw increased effort in the top ranks to address human rights problems, this eagerness does not yet translate to any changes among the rank and file, other rights activists said.

Natalia Taubina, who heads Public Verdict, said that it was certainly a positive sign that the document had been adopted, but doubted anything would come of it unless outside organisations were allowed to monitor the police.

Still, the fact that the Interior Ministry is publicly acknowledging its problems suggests a significant change, Taubina said.

"There are some recruits who can't say a single polite word," admitted Kolganova, the spokeswoman for the ministry's recruiting department. "We have to start somewhere."

Public opinion

An unfair cop?

In 2008, 16 per cent of respondents in a joint survey by the Levada Centre and Public Verdict said that their civil rights had been violated, and 24 per cent of those people said police were responsible for the violations. Of those who blamed the, 55 per cent said they had sought justice, but only 26 percent of those who said their rights had been violated had their problems fully resolved.

A 2006 by Public Verdict found that well more than half of young people had negative encounters with police in the preceding 12 months. In Moscow, 40 per cent said that police had been rude to them, while 40 per cent said officers tried to extort bribes, and 4 percent said they had been beaten up. Only 36 per cent said they had not been involved in any negative incidents with the police.