Amnesty reveals inmate toll

Press, 12 March 1983, Page 24

Amnesty reveals inmate toll

NZPA London The human rights organisation. Amnesty International, has said that it knew of nearly 200 people being forcibly confined to Russian psychiatric hospitals on political grounds in the last eight years and believed that the real total could be higher. It said that it had learned of 193 new cases since its 1975 report on Russian political prisoners, in which it called for an end to the abuse of psychiatry. The report described 120 known cases between 1969 and 1975, bringing the total

between 1969 and now to more than 300. The cases cited were the ones which Amnesty had been able to study in detail, and did not include people confined before 1969 or many cases about which the organisation said it not have enough information to know whether the people being held were prisoners of conscience. .Amnesty said that despite appeals by Soviet psychatrists and from abroad, psychiatric treatment was still being usaed to punish dissidents. Some of those being held for months, even years, had been seized for drawing attention to the treatment of others. Russians, including psychiatrists. who had tried to expose the abuse had been imprisoned, confined in psychiatric institutions, or forced to leave the country, said Amnesty. Russian and foreign psychiatrists had privately examined several people held in this way and found no medical grounds for their

confinement, it said. Many of the detainees had been treated with powerful drugs and in special psychiatric hospitals, where the regime was hardest, inmates had been beaten up by convicted criminals employed as orderlies. Under Soviet law people may be forcably confined only if they are dangerous to themselves or others.