New Soviet ‘political’ laws

Press, 6 December 1983, Page 28

New Soviet ‘political’ laws

NZPA-AFP Moscow The Soviet authorities have announced stringent new legislation under which prisoners could have their sentences extended without trial.

Observers in Moscow said the new laws were probably aimed at political prisoners, who are classified as common law offenders because Soviet law does not recognise political crimes.

The new legislation, published as additives to articles 188 and 198 of the penal code for the Republic of Russia, provides for the extension of sentences for detainees who violate prison

rules, as well as for those who leave for a “certain time” their place of domestic exile. The first additive mentions the “desertion of detention sites” and “insubordination” to “administrative rules in ... re-educative work (work camps) or any resistance to the (prison) administration.”

People found guilty of such actions are “liable to a (supplementary) prison sentence of one to three years” if they have already been punished during the previous year for offences committed in prison.

The same actions comitted by a “dangerous recidivist or someone convicted of a particularly serious

crime” leave their authors liable to supplementary sentences of one to five years.

The second additive is to the law on internal passports for Soviet citizens travelling within the country. It concerns those sentenced to domestic exile after having served time in work camps — in other words, to political prisoners.

Dissidents sentenced to work camps are usually given one or more years of domestic exile — confinement to a region of the Soviet Union.

Some dissidents, such as the physicist, Dr Andrei Sakharov, who has been con-

fined to the city of Gorky for almost four years, are relegated to domestic exile without ever having been sent to prison camp, or even gone on trial. The additive specifies that “voluntary leaving of an assigned site of residence in order to avoid adminstrative surveillance, as well as the unjustified absence of a person from the site of residence of which he has been assigned are punishable by (prison) sentences of one to three years.”

Observers said the authorities could detain certain people indefinitely, based on the new laws, since the extensions seem to be renewable.