During the 72 hours Larysa Ivanova spent in a police detention center in downtown Kyiv, an ambulance was called for her four times. In the first 24 hours, she was not allowed to use the toilet. Although she had a fit of asthma during one interrogation session and was close to suffocating, medical treatment was offered to her only after more than an hour.
'I was nearly dying, I coughed for about five hours during one day, the cell was damp, there was no ventilation,' Ivanova said. 'When I asked the guard why they didn't let me out to use the toilet, he said I failed to knock for him in a proper way.'
Ivanova's story is just one example of alleged improper treatment of inmates in Ukrainian prisons, which human rights activists say are widespread. Most cases, however, go unreported.
According to a recent study by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, at least 30 percent of those kept in custody in Ukraine are subjected to torture or other forms of mistreatment.
Ukrainian human rights commissioner Nina Karpachova says her visits last year to a number of Ukrainian prisons lead her to conclude that this figure may be much higher, since many inmates are afraid to openly admit their rights were violated.
'In one prison, after guards left the cell I was in, I asked the inmates if they were abused, and at least two-thirds raised their hands,' Karpachova said.
Even in Kyiv, conditions in prisons are 'unbearable and dreadful,' Karpachova said.
'We went to an investigative isolation ward of the Starokyivsky district police station, and what I saw was terrible,' Karpachova said in an interview.
'There were several people kept there, including a foreigner. They were hungry and cold. The toilet was outside the cell and they had to ask the guard for permission to use it.'
Of the 226,000 people presently kept in custody in Ukraine, some 40,000 are serving their terms in the country's 137 prisons.
The rest are in numerous detention centers of the Interior Ministry and the State Security Service, where they are kept during investigation.
Most of these institutions are old – many were built before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution – and the government cannot afford enough money for repairs.
The lack of money also prevents the authorities from feeding inmates properly and providing timely medical treatment. At the same time, prisoners' relatives face numerous limitations on what food they are allowed to send to the jail, Karpachova said.
'These conditions are like torture, but the authorities do not recognize them as such,' she said.
Officials at the Interior Ministry refused to be interviewed for this article.
One of the primary reasons police may resort to torture is help investigators extract evidence to solve a crime, which can be a major boost to their career.
That is why most complaints human rights watchdogs receive are about torture during investigations, said Evgeny Diky of Helsinki-90, a human rights group in Kyiv.
'It is a paradox, but the conditions are better in prisons, than in the temporary detention wards, where people are waiting to go on trial,' Diky said.
Also, unlike Western states, the definitions of torture and maltreatment are not spelled out in Ukrainian legislation, which makes it difficult to register many of such cases.
'In Ukraine one may appeal to court only over physical torture, whereas other forms of maltreatment are not punishable,' Diky said.
Human rights observers also say that distrust of the Ukrainian judiciary and the existing complicated court appeals procedure prevents many people from reporting instances of abuse.
'We get a lot of complaints from people who say they want to appeal directly to the European Court of Human Rights,' said Evgeny Diky of Helsinki-90. 'But when they learn that before that they have to go through the local court system, they refuse to proceed.'
Sometimes, people don't even seem to realize that torture is a violation of human rights, said Roman Romanov of the Human Rights Group in Kyiv.
Romanov cited a complaint his agency recently received from residents of a building in Sevastopol, which also housed a police detention center.
'They stated that every night they were disturbed by the screams of people being tortured,' Romanov said. 'But what surprised us is that they did not demand that the torturing be stopped, they only wanted it to be moved to a different place.'
