The “Incommunicado” Regime

Illustrative photo

Legal qualification:

Article 7(1)(f) of the Rome Statute: Torture (including the infliction of severe psychological suffering).

Article 7(1)(k): Other inhumane acts (deliberate creation of a situation of uncertainty for the family, use of isolation as punishment).

E.K. was the wife of a well-known opposition politician sentenced to 12 years in prison on charges of “organizing mass riots.” The first six months after the verdict were difficult but predictable. Her husband was in a colony, they exchanged letters. He was allowed one phone call per week. Once every three months, a lawyer was allowed to visit him.

Everything changed in one day. In March 2023, E.K. came to another scheduled lawyer call to get news. The lawyer walked out of the colony pale. “They didn’t let me see him,” he said. “The colony chief stated that the prisoner… refused to meet me. Wrote a written refusal.”

E.K. knew her husband. He would never refuse his only link to the outside world. It was a lie. The next week, letters stopped coming. Her own letters, which she sent daily, began returning marked “recipient refused to accept.” Phone calls ceased.

E.K. began knocking on doors. She went to the colony to meet the chief. “Is he healthy? What is happening?” she asked. The colony chief, a man with empty eyes, replied: “Your husband is fine. He is serving his sentence according to regime rules. He refuses correspondence and visits. That is his right.”

“But why?” E.K. cried.

“Probably doesn’t want to talk to you. Sort your family issues out yourselves,” he smirked.

The incommunicado regime began. Total information blackout. E.K. filed complaints with the Department for Enforcement of Sentences and the Prosecutor General’s Office. She received boilerplate replies: “No violations of detention conditions have been identified.”

A month passed. Two. Five. Eight.

“I didn’t know whether he was alive,” E.K. told human rights defenders. “It’s the worst torture imaginable. You wake up every morning thinking: ‘Is he still alive? Or is he gone already, and they just aren’t telling me?’ You imagine the worst. That he’s being beaten in a punishment cell. That he slit his wrists. That he died of illness, and they are hiding it.”

She tried to send him a parcel with medicine (he had a chronic condition). The parcel was rejected. “The inmate has no right to receive a parcel, as he is in a punishment cell.” This was the first clue. So he was in SHIZO. But for what? And why for so long?

After ten months of complete silence, E.K. received a message. A former inmate released from the same colony found her through social media. “Your husband is alive,” he wrote. “I saw him. He is kept in PKT (cell-type confinement). He is completely gray and very thin. They are deliberately creating unbearable conditions. They put an ‘activist’ in his cell to provoke fights. His letters are torn up, his medicine is not given. The administration is doing everything to break him. He asked to pass you only one word: ‘Hold on’.”

E.K. burst into tears right over her phone. He was alive.

“I realized that this incommunicado regime is deliberate torture,” she said. “They tortured not only him by isolating him from the world. They tortured me and our whole family with this uncertainty. They wanted us to lose our minds from fear and grief. To imagine his death every day. This is their method — killing at a distance, stretched out in time.”

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