Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

On 29 January 2024, Rafio Free Europe reported that Russian paleontologist and human rights defender Gregori Vinter, who was sentenced to three years in prison earlier this month on a charge of distributing “false” information about Russian armed forces involved in Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, has asked President Vladimir Putin to euthanize him “to avoid an excruciating death of diabetes.”

Vinter’s lawyer, Sergei Tikhonov, on January 28 called the letter written by his client before he was handed his sentence on January 18 “a gesture of despair.”

In the letter, Vinter says prisons could not supply the insulin he needs to treat his diabetes, while getting supplies from outside the institution would be impossible because he would have to visit doctors to get prescriptions, something that wouldn’t be allowed.

“My experience tells me that without my medicine my life in custody will be very short…. I will face a process of a long and cruel death…. Knowing that as an inmate I will face a mere excruciatingly painful death among the alien, cruel, and absolutely indifferent people of the prison, I ask you to allow a voluntary medical euthanasia for me,” Vinter’s letter to Putin says.

“Imprisonment for a person like me, a person who survived a stroke, a clinical death during COVID, an attempted murder in 2018, actually means an execution, a public execution accompanied with long-term suffering through a slow and painful death. This is not just 1937 [period of Josef Stalin’s great purge] — it is perverted pathological sadism that is known to the whole world as the Russian Federation’s Federal Penitentiary Service.”

Prison officials have not commented on Vinter’s letter and whether he would have regular access to the medical assistance he needs.

The 55-year-old Vinter is the leader of the For Human Rights group branch in his native city of Cherepovets. His human rights activities in recent years helped to reveal the mass beatings of inmates at a local prison and investigations of the penitentiary’s guards. He also made headlines in 2019 after he led several rallies protesting against the local government’s deforestation activities in the region around Cherepovets.

During the pandemic in 2020, Vinter was handed a parole-like two-year sentence over an online post about the transportation of convicts without medical masks and other COVID precautions.

Before the sentence was pronounced, Vinter spent time in a detention center where, he said, investigators tortured him with electricity and broke his leg.

Vinter later told journalists about what he endured in the detention center, which led to a public outcry and investigations of the center’s administration.

The case against Vinter was initiated in August 2022 after he posted materials on the Internet about alleged atrocities committed by Russian troops against civilians in Ukraine.

The Memorial human rights group has recognized Vinter as a political prisoner.

https://www.rferl.org/a/imprisoned-russian-rights-activist-asks-putin-euthanasia/32796757.html