80% of those held in SIZO [remand centres] have confessions beaten out of them

Well-known human rights defender and Director of the Ukrainian-American Human Rights Bureau, Semyon Gluzman, is seeking to ensure that at legislative level “voluntary confessions” are removed from police practice.

Semyon Gluzman spoke about this during a press conference in Rivne. He believes that such practice leads to physical violence against crime suspects.

He stresses that police work needs to be assessed not according to the number of criminal investigations launched, but by the number of crimes solved, since otherwise this leads to unjustified sentences and torture of suspects in the course of a criminal investigation. 160 thousand prisoners in Ukraine, he believes, is not an indicator of a criminogenic society, but evidence that many petty criminals are sentenced, while major corrupt dealers and swindlers escape punishment. Gluzman believes that at present more than 80% of those held in remand centres need the assistance of human rights defenders since in the majority of these cases the police have “beaten confessions” out of them.