Russia just shut out independent inspectors from its own prisons
1 hour ago · 2 November 2026Share
A police detention facility in Kstovo, Russia. File photo. Vladimir Menkov · CC BY-SA 3.0
Russia just shut the door on independent prison inspections.
Its exit from the European treaty against torture took effect about a day ago. Russia had been a party to this convention since 1998.
So what does that actually mean? The Council of Europe's anti-torture committee, the CPT, says it ends independent monitoring of detention sites inside Russia completely.
Alan Mitchell runs the CPT. He says this marks the end of the committee's mandate in the country. He says quote "any independent monitoring of places of deprivation of liberty" inside Russia is now over.
Here's how we got here. Russia told the Council of Europe it was leaving on 30 October last year. The rules say a withdrawal only kicks in a full year after that notice. That year is now up.
Now look at what Russia was actually doing with this convention while it was still a member.
Between 1998 and 2021, the CPT visited Russian detention sites 30 times. It checked more than 450 places in total.
But here's the catch. Russia was the only country in the whole convention that had a standing policy of blocking publication of what the CPT found. Of those 30 visits, only four reports ever saw daylight.
Ten of the hidden visits were to Chechnya and the North Caucasus, between 2000 and 2017. The CPT publicly criticised Russia's lack of cooperation five separate times.
And the CPT hasn't actually set foot inside Russia since 2021.
So what's happened since then? Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the committee says it has received numerous accounts of alleged torture and ill-treatment by Russian officials. Some in occupied Ukrainian territory. Some inside Russia itself. It couldn't check any of it, because Russia wouldn't let it in.
The rest of this story is for members.
Eastern Europe as defined in Serbian geography literature and textbooks. File photo.Ђидо · CC BY-SA 4.0
This isn't happening in isolation. Russia stopped being a member of the Council of Europe back on 16 March 2022, right after the invasion. It stopped being a party to the European Convention on Human Rights that September. Russia's parliament voted to denounce the anti-torture convention on 17 September 2025. Vladimir Putin signed that into law twelve days later.
So what's Moscow's defence? It's not really about torture at all. It's about a seat on a committee.
The Kremlin says the Council of Europe blocked the election of a new Russian member to the CPT, and that Russia hasn't had a representative on the committee since December 2023. It calls that discriminatory.
The law's own explanatory text says leaving the convention doesn't lower safeguards against torture in Russia, and points to Russia's continued membership of other human rights treaties. Russia's foreign ministry has previously said the withdrawal won't harm Russian citizens, and that Moscow still stands by its international human rights obligations.
And here's the comparison the CPT draws. It says Ukraine lets it visit any detention site, at any time, and publishes its reports automatically.
Now the backdrop. The CPT says it has received accounts of torture against people held in occupied Ukrainian territory and inside Russia since February 2022. Separately, the UN human rights office says torture by Russian authorities is widespread and systematic. It says more than 95 per cent of Ukrainian prisoners of war it interviewed reported being tortured or ill-treated.
Russia rejects every bit of this. It calls the allegations a disinformation campaign. Its deputy UN envoy, Maria Zabolotskaya, has said it's actually Russian prisoners held by Ukraine who are being tortured.
So where does this leave things? The CPT's mandate now stops at the Russian border. The committee says it will carry on working in the Council of Europe's other 46 member states.
What it won't be doing, for the first time in almost three decades, is checking what's happening inside Russian cells.
Nobody yet knows if another international body will try to fill that gap. And nobody knows if Russia will ever issue a formal denial of the torture allegations themselves.
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