November 12, 2008 By James Kimer

From the Isolator to House Arrest

rbkdaily111108.jpegThe RBK Daily website offers the following item in its Finances section, of all places. For those of our readers who are unfamiliar with the term “SIZO”, it means “Investigative Isolator”. This is a Russian pre-trial detention facility where innocent-until-proven-guilty arrestees are held on remand, often for many years, with hideous conditions and a regime stricter than that for most incarcerated convicts serving out their sentences. Russian SIZOs are notoriously overcrowded, often with 40-50 people sharing a smoke-filled cell designed for 8-10 and having to sleep in shifts with the lights on 24 hours a day, a one-hour daily walk in a filthy courtyard irrespective of the weather, and a brief shower once a week – if the plumbing works. Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev are currently being held in a special super-isolated wing of the SIZO of the city of Chita in Siberia. While we certainly welcome anything that can “promote the normalization of the situation” in Russia’s nefarious Investigative Isolators and improve the plight Russian prisoners (especially those who haven’t even been tried and convicted yet), we think we’re pretty safe in guessing that none of the measures proposed below will apply to Khodorkovsky and Lebedev.