Eliot R Albers gives members an update of his first few months in the job.

Hello INPUD members and friends,

I wanted to write to you all to let you know what INPUD has been up to since I and then Hazel came into our positions as INPUD’s first full time staff members.

Much of November was spent as you will all know coordinating INPUD’s first global demonstration on World AIDS Day which this year was dedicated to exposing the brutality and medieval mature of Russia’s drug policy, which keeping OST illegal and refusing to implement NSP is driving a massive HIV pandemic amongst our community. Whilst the demos, held in 12 cities globally didn’t draw much press attention, they were a resounding success in showing INPUD at its activist best, out in the streets, loud and proud, protesting about the issues that matter to our community. Erin did a splendid job coordinating and Berne’s designs gave the protests a strong, coherent visual look. Too many others of you played invaluable roles to mention, I don’t want to leave anyone out but thank all of you.

From the street we moved to the ‘corridors of power’ in terms of participating as part of the NGO delegation in one of the major international institutions, the Programme Coordinating Board of UNAIDS in Geneva where INPUD also held its first side event at a High Level Meeting. This brought together activists from Russia, Afghanistan and Portugal to attest to the impact of different legal environments on levels of HIV amongst our community. Both the meeting and demonstrations showed INPUD’s ability to use social media to the greatest effect to spread and disseminate our messages. Also at the global level UNODC have established an expert group on Stimulants to write guidance on services for stimulant users. INPUD was approached at the start of the process and we now have a team of five peer stimulant experts from US, Indonesia, Thailand/Australia, Puerto Rico and Russia representing a wide range of stimulant types and routes of administration. This provides a focus for INPUD’s stimulant experts to gather together and this invitation marks positive forward progress with UNODC around the practical expression of meaningful participation. Further global advocacy initiatives have been the on-going Global Commission on HIV and the Law (GCHL) on which INPUD has powerful representation; finally, along with MSMGF and NSWP we contributed to a set of definitions and chosen language to be used by UNAIDS.

Less visibly INPUD has been gearing up to launch into its first major paid projects. The first to start is an ambitious 4.5-year project funded by the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, called the Community Action for Harm Reduction (CAHR) project. The project has four pillars: increasing access, building capacity, promoting human rights and brokering knowledge. Underpinning our whole approach will be the involvement of target groups at all stages of the project: in shaping the programmes in country through participatory activities; in delivery by acting as peer educators; and as leaders by influencing national and international policy processes. This will see us providing capacity building events for people who use drugs in 5 countries – Kenya, China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia. The lessons learnt in these countries will feed into a major international advocacy campaign that we will lead with the International Drug Policy Consortium and Harm Reduction International highlighting the legal barriers to access to HIV services, and the human rights abuses to which our people are subject. The project will start next month with a 5-day capacity building event amongst people who inject heroin in Nairobi. At the same time we will be training the relatively new local harm reduction services in the best techniques for ensuring that our people are meaningfully involved in the services directed at them. This is an important opportunity to ensuring that the roll out of harm reduction services in Kenya and the other countries have meaningful participation built in from the very beginning. One of our major aims in the project will be to support drug user participation in programming and decision-making, including by supporting the development of networks of people who use drugs.

The second project, funded by the Dutch AidsFonds is a 5 year project in which we are joined by international networks representing the other two populations disproportionately affected by HIV, namely men who have sex with men, and sex workers. This project will see us again working in Kenya, but also in Ukraine and several countries covered by ANPUD. This project has five major objectives:

• Improve the quality of and access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support and other support services for people who use drugs

• Improve the human rights of PUDs

• Integrate specific services for PUDs within the general health system

• Strengthen the capacity of civil society organisations that work on HIV and PUDs.

Within this project we are also able to continue the work we have been doing to strengthen networking within the MENA, and Eastern European & Central Asian regions. Whilst the latter region is considerably further ahead in its journey of development, our Middle Eastern network MENANPUD is at a germinal stage and is showing enormous energy and potential. People who use drugs in both regions face considerable challenges and are as such crucial areas for INPUD to be working in.

Some other smaller, but no less important, projects that we have been involved with have been helping to organise a series of focus groups looking at Treatment for Prevention of HIV amongst PWIDs alongside ‘Global Advocacy for HIV Prevention’ and several other organisations. INPUD was a partner in the production of ‘What works?’ SRH and HIV linkages brief on people who use drugs in Indonesia; and at the moment one of our members is producing an HIV Prevention Report Card aimed at PWU heroin in Afghanistan. With GNP+ we contributed to a questionnaire looking at the human rights implications of ART for our community. INPUD was also approached to give some feedback into an early feasibility study of a new drug for treating Hep C – they were particularly keen to hear our views about side effects. We have also been consulted on the chosen location for the next HRI conference – I can’t reveal where it is going to be held yet, but can confirm that HRI are bending over backwards to ensuring that our needs are met, that our input is substantial and that the entire conference is a user friendly zone. No more pokey back rooms for us!

As well as getting this very ambitious paid work programme underway, we have been developing our approach to the International AIDS Conference, which is, again as most of you know, disastrously being held in the US and as such largely rules out the participation of not only us, but sex workers. Our substantial exclusion from the conference is something that we are working around and we are developing an approach that will combine an attempt to increase the participation of US based members of our community, and simultaneously to draw attention to, and protest, the highly exclusionary nature of the conference. The International AIDS Society seem to have recognised the magnitude of their mistake in holding the conference in a country that systematically denies entry to not just members of our own community but also to people who sell sex and as such is responding not only by trying to cover over the mistake that is represented by holding this conference in Washington, but also by seeking our involvement at a very early stage in the development of their next conference in 2014 in Australia. As some of my earlier emails have suggested, another area that we have been looking at is developing a response to the recent collapse of round 11 of the Global Fund; whilst our concerns are likely to be drowned out by the large AIDS service organisations, not to mention the TB and Malaria charities, NGOs and others, we still need to make very clear the cataclysmic impact that the cancellation of the fund will have for our people living in the many countries where all of the harm reduction services, NSPs and OST are provided by NGOs and programmes that are entirely provided for by the Global Fund.

With other funding streams that have become available to us we are working hard on stabilising our virtual environment. Building solid information technology systems that will both facilitate our work programme and improve our internal and external communications; the end product of this will see a sophisticated virtual environment with a strong redesigned website which can both showcase INPUD to partner organisations, multilateral bodies, donors and other interested parties, but also act as an attractive resource to you, our membership, in turn this will be a major tool in building INPUD’s membership, making us stronger, and extending our reach. To help us to do this, we will be continuing with the roll out of INPUD member lists in other languages including French, Spanish, and Portuguese. In addition, we are also using our FaceBook page, blogs and Twitter accounts extensively to ensure that we have a strong, vital presence in the virtual world. Most importantly perhaps, you will all, I am sure, be pleased to know, that rapid progress is now being made towards securing the legal and financial incorporation of the organisation as an independent entity.

Over the coming months, we will be carrying out a number of measures to strengthen INPUD’s internal democracy, vitality and culture. Most important of all will be the upcoming Board election, which, in the absence of an obvious global meeting at which to gather this year will be a virtual election carried out on one of the systems that we have developed. We hope to elect a strong, accountable Board to oversee the work of the staff team and that a strong regional, and gender range of candidates will come forward and that all members will cast their votes. Something else that is planned is a skills audit of the membership – we have an enormous range of skills, talents and knowledge amongst us and we want to be able to harness these abilities in the most effective way possible, carrying out an audit will, we hope be an efficient way of doing this. Increasingly from now on INPUD will be called upon to do work that our staff team either don’t have the time to do, or that we would want to offer to one of our members to do on a consultancy basis; in the future, calls like this will be advertised to membership so that people can tender to carry them out. Following on from this, we will be launching some new working groups to cover some of the thematic areas that impact most strongly on our lives, including HIV, OST, Hep-C, stigma and discrimination, Human Rights, Harm Reduction, prisons, drug law reform. The intention is that all of these groups will produce INPUD position papers reflecting the consensus positions held by the membership and organisation.

I am sure that I have missed a lot out, but I hope that this gives you some idea of the amount of work that INPUD is doing and the progress that we are making as we establish ourselves as the peak international network representing our community on the global stage, reaching from the streets to grab the throats and ears of diplomats and politicians to push our agendas in the global conversation.

Thank you to all of our members whose work has been referred to above – you all know who you are – I didn’t want to start naming individuals in case I left someone out, but needless to say you have all done, and are doing, fantastic work for our community. We can only grow stronger!

all the best

Eliot Albers

Acting Director and Programme Coordinator

International Network of People who Use Drugs

Terms: PUD (Person who/uses drugs) PWID (Person Who Injects Drugs) NGO (Non Govt Org) MENA (Middle east North Africa)

Users United Around the Globe in Support of their Russian Peers

New York City Kicked off the global protest on the eve of World AIDS Day, and were followed by 12 other cities

POST Press Release (please feel free to share this post on your website, but remember to link it back to here! Thanks!)

On World Aids Day, 2011, just a few short days ago, harm reduction organisations led by people who use drugs and supported by the International Network of People who Use Drugs(INPUD) gathered outside Russian embassies in cities across the world in the largest ever global show of solidarity by and for people who use drugs.

The protests, entitled ‘Shame Russia Shame’, was directed at Russia’s highly controversial drug policies which are believed to be driving the EEC regions HIV and TB epidemics. Injecting drugs with contaminated equipment is driving Russia’s HIV epidemic, now the fastest growing in the world and it is reflected in the numbers; as many as 80% of new infections are occurring amongst people who inject drugs (PWID), in a total HIV positive population of approx 1.3million. With this in mind, recent projections forecast an additional 5 million people could become infected with HIV in the near future, unless Russia drastically transforms the way it is dealing with its HIV pandemic.

INPUD member Erin O’Mara says Russia’s drug policies are ‘brutalising’

Erin O’Mara, (editor of UK’s Black Poppy Magazine and INPUD member) who coordinated the global protest said the human catastrophe unfolding in Russia is almost indescribable in its brutality and neglect.”Russia has more heroin users than anywhere in the world yet because they offer no safe alternatives such as methadone or buprenorphine, and corruption has driven the price of heroin above what many Russian users can afford, new home made concoctions like desomorphine (nicknamed krokodil) are gaining ground, with devastating health consequences for the user”. Erin adds, “To scratch the surface of Russian drug policies, you find some of the most brutalizing policies in the world; where their should be harm reduction, regulation, treatment and support, there is neglect, abuse, imprisonment, disease and death.”

New York City groups Harm Reduction Coalition and Vocal NY, led the first of the World Aids Day demos, reading speeches and presenting a statement of demands to the Russian Embassy, which included the demand for Opiate Substitution Therapies (OST) such as methadone to be both legal and accessible to the 2 million or more injecting drug users in Russia.

Mexico lays its candlelight vigil in memory of those who have died of AIDS.

Mexico soon followed, again on the eve of World AIDS Day, with their protest led by Espolea, an organisation who’s young people delivered their heartfelt candlelight vigil to remember those who have died of AIDS and those with HIV facing so much oppression in the Russian Federation. It was a very generous tribute from our young colleagues in Mexico at a time in the drugs war when they are facing such enormous troubles of their own. (see video below).

As December 1st -and World AIDS Day dawned,  the global domino effect began and cities from Canberra, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Berlin, Bucharest, London, Paris, Porto, Stockholm, Tblisi, Toronto, delivered their protests, and a unified SHAME RUSSIA SHAME rang out in front of Russian Embassies across the world.

Londons’ Russian Embassy Protest

Speeches were given and a statement of demands were delivered to the Embassies which included demands to see the introduction of Opiate Substitution therapy (OST) and the scale up of needle and syringe programmes, which although currently funded by outside NGO’s and not by the Russian Government, numbers of services are still shockingly inadequate, with around 50 odd for the entire Russian Federation.

The city of Tblisi also took a brave step and protested outside their Swiss Embassy, which currently stands in for the Russian embassy which has been removed from Georgia for political reasons. Nevertheless, Georgians who have also seen the emergence of the drug Krokodil from across the Russian border were keen to show solidarity with their Russian drug using peers, as history has meant they were very aware of the might of the Russian police forces and their attitudes towards drug users. Georgians took a huge risk protesting in Tblisi but seemed buoyed by recent workshops in drug user organising and empowerment and peerwork with INPUD.

New Vector, in Tblisi in support of their Russian peers, and raising awareness of krokodil

Demonstrators had the special opportunity to read out a letter from Russia, from an INPUD member and drug user activist named Alex, who spoke directly to his peers across the world about Russia’s indifference and the strength he gains from a unified drug using community.

Alex writes: “To my despair, I live in a country where the means don’t justify the ends Where it’s easier to save the lives of healthy people by destroying those who are sick. Where ethics and humanity have given way to contempt and cruelty. Where they evaluate prevention not in terms of possibilities and outcomes but dollars and popularity. I express my deepest gratitude to all of you who share my protest.  For me, World AIDS Day does not exist in Russia. For me World AIDS Day in Russia means white carnations and condolence cards.I’m alive today thanks to your help and your faith in our united strength. I wish us resilient spirits, and that love fills all of our homes. I’m with you today.”

Demonstrators from the LGBT community also joined London’s embassy protest to add their voices against Russia’s recently passed St Petersberg bill, which, having already passed the first hearing, would severely further restrict the rights of the LGBT community. The oppression and marginalisation of the LGBT community also adds to a difficult environment to disseminate HIV prevention/treatment information. (click here for more info on this issue.)

The protest was an exciting, moving and empowering event for all concerned, however everyone -

The white slippers and carnations outside the Russian Embassy in Canberra, Australia

- was acutely aware that Russian themselves were simply not safe enough to protest on World AIDS Day, no matter how peacefully. Although this protest had its roots in Moscow in 2009 on International Drug User Day, when 5 Russian activists were arrested after trying to lay red carnations and white slippers (the Russian symbol for the dead) at the steps of the Drug Control Service, the protest expanded on International Remembrance Day 2011. 3 countries took part and (Budapest, Berlin and Barcelona) remembered their peers outside Russian embassies, again laying the symbols of the protest. This world AIDS Day,was a call out to the world that we will not let our Russian peers be forgotten -that we will stand side by side them as we all fight to ensure that Russian citizens have the right to humane, evidenced based, enlightened drug policies and treatment.

For more information and/or quotes from INPUD members and city organisers, please do not hesitate to get in touch with INPUD.

Contact: INPUD Deputy Project Co-ordinatorL eliotalbers@inpud.net who can put you in touch with the right person or answer your questions.

NOTE: A huge thank you to the global coordinators based in London – Women of Substance, Black Poppy Magazine, and Ava Project (London)- -and our partners in Eastern Europe Andrey Rylkov Foundation, Eurasian Harm Reduction Network and all those organisations who took part in this event. INPUD members;  Plataforma Drogologica (Barcelona), Deutsch AIDS Hilfe (Berlin), Harm Reduction Coalition, Vocal NY (New York City) ,ASUD, Cannabis Sans Frontiere (Paris), AIVL, NUAA, CAHMA(Canberra)  CASOP (Porto) Association Intergration (Bucharest),Svenska Brukarforeningen (Stockholm), New Vector (Tblisi), CounterFit (Toronto) Chemical Reaction (Edinburgh) , Espolea (Mexico City) and -in the UK – a big thanks to members of the LGBT community (particularly, the transgender community for attending and speaking in London -Charles Celeste and Roz)

Dec 1st at 9 cities around the globe

On Dec 1st, 2011, World Aids day, people in 8 countries around the world will descend on Russian Embassies -To protest at the criminal treatment of people who use drugs – in the biggest catastrophe in the history of HIV in recent times. (See below for where and when).

In Russia today, we are bearing witness to one of the biggest,

avoidable catastrophes in the history of HIV – the lack of response to the epidemic in Russia. We must point directly to the specific responsibility that Russian medical and public health officials bear for creating and sustaining this disastrous situation. Of particular concern are Russia’s, brutalising drug policies and its recently revised Total War on Drugs, which has resulted in further pushing people who use drugs into hiding, prison, and enforced detention, and severely compromising efforts from the international community to revert the trajectory of HIV/AIDS. The world is approaching a crossroads; a strong and decisive downward trajectory in the epidemic is possible in all countries -but it will only happen if the people who are most vulnerable to infection are supported and their human rights realised. Governments have legal obligations to act. Indeed, the implementation of harm reduction measures is consistant with and required by states obligations under international human rights law. 1,2.

Injecting drugs with contaminated equipment is driving Russia’s HIV epidemic, now the fastest growing in the world and it is reflected in the numbers; as many as 80% of new infections are occurring amongst people who inject drugs (PWID), in a total HIV positive population of approx 1million. With this in mind, recent projections forecast an additional 5 million people could become infected with HIV in the near future, unless Russia transforms the way it is dealing with its HIV pandemic.6

Russian authorities have repeatedly come in for fierce international criticism over their policy towards the treatment of drug dependence, which relies almost completely on the promotion of abstinence to the exclusion of harm reduction.  Russian officials claim, incorrectly, that the effectiveness of opiate substitution therapy (such as providing methadone and buprenorphine) has not been adequately demonstrated, and as such it is prohibited by law. Yet, despite the addition in 2005 of these two drugs to WHO’s list of essential medicines, and multiple position papers by international experts calling for substitution treatment as a critical element in the response to HIV (IOM, 2006; UNODC, UNAIDS, and WHO, 2005), methadone or buprenorphine remain prohibited by law in Russia and promotion of its use – punishable by a jail sentence.

With over 30,000 people dying from drug overdoses every year, numbers that can be shown to markedly reduce with the implementation of OST, and 150 becoming infected with HIV each day (2/3rds of which are injecting drug users), also evidenced to drastically reduce with the roll out of Needle and Syringe Programmes (NSP), it is upon everyone who cares about humanity, to demand an immediate transformational shift in Russia’s approach to HIV prevention and its treatment of drug users.  Access to NSP and OST is in itself, a human right;  UN Ruman Rights Monitors have specifically stated harm reduction interventions as necessary for states to comply with the right to health. 5

Related articles

• Protest at Russian Embassies Worldwide: Dec 1st World Aids Day (russianembassyprotest.wordpress.com)
• Russia at risk of HIV Hitting Catastrophic Levels (russianembassyprotest.wordpress.com)
• Russian Embassy Protest – Dec 1st 2011 (russianembassyprotest.wordpress.com)
• Shame Russia Shame! (russianembassyprotest.wordpress.com)
• ‘Eastern Europe has fastest growing HIV epidemic in the world’ – UN official (rt.com)

Irina Teplinskaya

I have been most afraid of this since I started litigation against the Russian Government. In February 2011, I made a request to the Ministry of Health in Kaliningrad Oblast to provide me with drug dependency treatment in the form of opioid substitution therapy (OST) based on my drug treatment medical records, which date back to 1983. My request was denied on the grounds that OST is prohibited in Russia. I appealed the [Kaliningrad] Ministry of Health’s decision in the District Court of the Leningrad Oblast, with reference to the Russian Constitution and all international legal instruments. On May 27, 2011, the District Court of the Leningrad Oblast did not satisfy my appeal in which I challenged the Ministry of Health. After having received this response, I appealed to the Regional Court of Kaliningrad. On August 3, 2011, the Kaliningrad Regional Court upheld the District Court’s decision. I was then going to file a complaint with the Constitutional Court of Russia and the European Court of Human Rights.

From May 14th to yesterday, August 18th, I underwent drug rehabilitation in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, my trustees were dealing with the legal process of filing complaints to the Constitutional Court of Russia and the European Court of Human Rights.

Yesterday, August 18, 2011, I arrived at Kaliningrad from Kiev at 14:45, and at the passport control, I realized that something was wrong. After I had my passport stamped and crossed the border, I placed my hand luggage on a baggage carousel. In this bag, I had two Kiev cakes, which I myself put into an absolutely empty bag. I still had to collect my check-in luggage (a sports bag). However, I was not allowed to enter the Russian territory. Indeed, four men in civilian clothes, an agent with a sniffer dog, and four women from airport services were waiting for me in the security aisle. The men in civilian clothes introduced themselves as Federal Security Service officers from the airport, showed me their identity cards (a person named Eugene Drapp led this process) and told me that I had to undergo a personal search. I was brought into a room; and the dog sniffed my hand luggage. The dog did not find anything, because I had nothing. When I said that I still had a check-in bag to collect, the Federal Security Service officers wanted to take the baggage ticket/tag from me and find this bag. I refused. I explained that the bag was not locked; and that it would be easy to open and plant something inside the bag. I therefore went with them to the luggage compartment. They called customs – there were now about 15 people. I found my bag and they began to search it. They only searched the checked-in luggage since the customs officials are not responsible for hand luggage. All other present witnesses were airport employees; I was therefore isolated from civilians.

They wrote up a report on the interrogation (I have the copy). The report included the list of all items that were in the bag and concluded that no illegal items intended for trafficking were found. In the bag were my personal belongings, soap supplies, washing powder and anti-retroviral therapy (ART). The washing powder was in a plastic bag–I packed it this way as it did not fit into my bag. I had a week supply of ART drugs, but it was largely in bulk, because a trusted person from Kaliningrad sent the drugs to me by postal mail when I was in Ukraine. There were 14 tablets of Epivir, 14 tablets of Ziagen in a jar labelled Epivir, and 28 tablets of Intelens in a plastic bag – as packaged as I received them by mail. In the inventory, the powder was recorded as a washing powder and the tablets – according to their names. I told them that I was taking HIV treatment. After that, I was again taken to the room for a personal search and was left with the two female employees from the airport: they did a search on me but they were also witnesses. I was strip searched; yet, they found nothing. They sealed my laptop and other belongings, and searched the sports bag once again. Only powder and therapy already set aside as seized were found, and marked “unknown powder” and “unknown pills”. Even though the pills were thoroughly described – color, size, shape, numbers and letters carved on them. After my urgent plea (ARV therapy cannot be interrupted), and calls to the authorities, they gave me ARV drugs for 2 days. The rest has been sealed, signed, and the same airport employee-witnesses may have put their signatures on these items.

The cakes were pulled out of the shopping bag, unpacked and everything was searched again. Having searched the cakes, the Federal Security Service officers suddenly asked me to give them my bag, although it was obvious that the bag was empty. I was surprised, but passed the bag to them, because I saw that there was nothing in there. When one of them began to shake it, one pill came out, as if from a sleeve. I had never seen such a pill before. It was the size of a Tsitramon, bright white, with one side stating “40″, and the other side deeply divided into 4 parts– each part of the convex and sharp like little pyramids. The pill was also sealed. I wrote in the report that the ART drugs and washing powder are mine, but I had never seen this pill – it was not there when I was packing. I realized the full horror of what had happened: I would not be allowed into the Russian Federation territory due to accusations of drug smuggling. This pill did not appear by accident; it is an illegal drug.

I was then taken to the border control directorate (Federal Security Service), and ARV tablets and powder were sent for a test. I wrote an explanation, personally describing all that had happened, and expressed my concerns. In addition, I described the story with the pill, and stated that this pill is not mine. I was at the border control until 23:30. They took both passports so that I cannot leave Russia.

I would like to emphasize that the search was conducted illegally– the witnesses who attended were the same women who searched me – the airport customs officers.

Today, the investigator told me that the examination results of the tablet, which they planted on me, showed that this tablet was methadone. Now, I’m going to an investigator. I do not know what happens after that.

I think that they planted methadone just because I fought and argued for the removal of legislative barriers in Russia to the treatment of drug addiction with substitution therapy with methadone and buprenorphine. I believe that this was done in order to discredit my social position, out of revenge for my attempts to protect the rights of people who use drugs in the national and international bodies, including courts of Kaliningrad.

I want to say that the past two months that I spent in Ukraine, I did not take methadone or any narcotic drugs or psychotropic substances. My rehabilitation was in a drug-free environment. I am ready to do all necessary tests to confirm this.

Please provide any help in protecting my rights violated by the actions of law enforcement agencies. Herewith, I trust the Andrey Rylkov Foundation (FAR) to represent my interests in all Russian and international bodies and organizations, and disseminate information on everything that happens to me to all the media, web sites and other information sources. Also, I trust FAR to disclose my medical information on the diagnosis and my personal data in my interest as necessary.

Irina Abdyusheva (Teplinskaya) August 19, 2011, Kaliningrad

Click here to link to the Andrey Rylkov Foundation

Author: Mikhail Golichenko, Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network

16 July 2011 marked the second anniversary of the arrest of Denis Matveyev, a Russian Human Rights activist who was accused of drug trafficking and sentenced to six years in a high-level security prison. During his three-year fight against corruption in the Russian city of Naberezhnie Chelny, Matveyev got under the skin of authorities on several occasions.

Two months before his arrest, Matveyev managed to disclose a scheme that police officials were using to pocket public money and that of detainees in temporary detention centres[1].

In addition to his anti-corruption and human rights activities, Matveyev volunteered for harm reduction projects to help people who use drugs to reduce negative health consequences of illicit drug use, such as HIV and other blood-borne diseases. He often had contacts with people who use drugs, which apparently played a role in how police retaliated.

Matveyev was apprehended on 16 July 2009 and has remained in custody since then.

On 21 July 2009, the Press Service of the Tatarstan Interior Ministry released information on the detention of Matveyev, who was suspected of drug trafficking. The same information was also made public on the website of the Russian Federation’s Interior Ministry[2]. Not many offenders in Russia are awarded with such high-level attention.

On 18 March 2010, Matveyev was convicted and sentenced to six years in a high-security prison.

In violation of the “fair-trial” principle, the court completely ignored defence arguments for entrapment, lack of sufficient proof for incriminating acts and the incorrect qualification of their severity. In total, there were more than 60 gross violations of the right to fair trial in the case of Matveyev.

The prosecution was based on the results of three test purchase operations. The first operation has been carried out by the undercover police officer who mimicked a drug user suffering drug withdrawal syndrome. The other two test purchase operations were carried our with help of a drug user whom police use as an undercover agent. Police documented that, upon request of police undercover agents and for their money, Matveyev purchased heroin from another person (a drug user Fedorchuk) and handed over it to agents. There was no information produced by police to prove that Matveyev was ever engaged in any of the illicit drug activities apart from those instigated by the police agents. Matveyev denied his guilt in the drug trafficking.

It was obvious that he was incited by police agents, who were or pretended to be people addicted to drugs suffering withdrawal, in order to purchase drugs to alleviate drug withdrawal symptoms. Aside from the police entrapment, there was no other evidence that Matveyev’s had ever engaged in illicit drug use. The court did not assess these facts, despite numerous motions of the defence. These circumstances of the case of Matveyev clearly resemble those of Khudobin v. Russia and Vanyan v. Russia, where the European Court of Human rights found a violation of the right to a fair trial because the domestic court “did not analyze the relevant factual and legal elements which would have helped it to distinguish entrapment from a legitimate form of investigative activity”.[3]

For more on the story click here

INPUD will be covering more issues about Russia over the coming up to round up in a World Aids Day Protest at Russian Embassies across the world, on Dec 1st. Please comment or email INPUD to find out more.

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