Terror And Torture'Human Rights Watch
said that the case was far from an isolated one, but just one of three trials ending in verdicts since February 5 that were "marred by the prosecution and judges' refusal to rigorously investigate complaints of abuse, and by their reliance on dubious expert analysis and the use of anonymous 'secret witnesses.'"
All three were "deeply flawed terrorism cases in which the defendants alleged incommunicado detention, torture, and other ill-treatment to extract confessions," the New York-based group said.
Meanwhile, outside Russia, Stanislav Aseyev, a journalist and blogger who spent 962 days as a captive of the Russia-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine before he was released and sent to Kyiv in a prisoner swap in November, described a small portion of the horrors he faced in an excerpt of manuscripts he wrote mainly while held in a makeshift prison in his native city of Donetsk.'
- RFE/RL,
The Week In Russia: 2020 Or 1937: Show Trials, Torture, And The Emperor In The Elevator, February 14, 2020
Context'..how Russia's political regime consolidated and the country became ‘badly governed' '