The Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan published ad hoc report “On the Rights of Detained and Convicted Persons Transferred to the Disciplinary Cell on Inviolability of Private and Family Life, Freedom of Communications”.
The results of the consideration of individual complaints submitted to the Defender, as well as the monitoring of National Preventive Mechanism alleged that due to the problematic legal regulations the illegal practice has been established.
Particularly, the transfer of detained or convicted person to disciplinary cell, despite any circumstance, is automatically depriving him/her of the contact with outside world, based on the imperative ban. Under such regulations, it turns out that this type of sanction has the nature of inflicting additional deprivations, which has no connection with its aim and reasons of the sanction. The disciplinary sanction itself applies by the decision of the head of penitentiary institution, but the issue of depriving communication is not justified. Under this circumstances the individual approach is not ensured and the behavioral risk of person deprived of liberty is not assessed.
According to the Defender’s conviction, such inadequate deprivation causes the disproportionate and automatic restriction of the rights of detained or convicted person on inviolability of private and family life, as well as, correspondence, telephone calls and the freedom of other means of communications stated in the Constitution.
It also needs to be stated that for the systematic nature of the problem, the Defender submitted application to the Constitutional Court, raising the issue of unconstitutionality of the respective regulations. The incompliance of those regulations with the international law was also justified.