The Russian human rights organization Agora told Kasparov.ru on Friday that the court convicted Russia of violating Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture and “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Russia was convicted of the later offense.

The HIV-positive prisoner, who had been held in St. Petersburg’s famous Kresty prison, appealed to the Strasbourg Court in November 2005. His diagnosis came two days after his arrest on May 20, 2004, and the prisoner’s health began to decline that October.

When the prisoner appealed to doctors at Kresty for treatment, he was told to take aspirin, papaverine, and painkillers.

When the man tried to object that this type of treatment was clearly insufficient, he was threatened with solitary confinement, which he was placed in at the end of October.

Conditions in the solitary cell were deplorable: prisoners in neighboring cells confirmed that there was no heat, with temperatures in the winter dropping to 45-50 degrees Fahrenheit, along with no ventilation or hot water. Moreover, medical personnel rarely visited the area.

Medics at Kresty said that they “don’t have medicine for HIV-positive prisoners due to the lack of funding.” When asked for anti-retroviral drugs by the HIV-positive prisoner, they administered painkillers and added some extra sugar and margarine to his daily rations.

The prisoner was twice refused admittance to a hospital on the basis that there wasn’t enough space because of so many HIV patients already there.

The Russian government insisted in court that the prisoner had received adequate medical care. Officials said that he was regularly examined by competent doctors who carried out a series of medical tests on his blood, which, in their opinion, was sufficient to judge the condition of his health.

The Strasbourg Court pointed out that the patient lacks the necessary medical knowledge to know what drugs he would need to treat his condition without a doctor’s prescription.

According to Russian Federal Penitentiary Service representative Sergei Tsygankov, the 53-year-old Vera Trifonova died at 12:35 pm on April 30, 2010, in the intensive care unit of the hospital at the Matrosskaya Tishina criminal investigation detention facility (SIZO) in Moscow. Local police were called to the scene, established that there were no signs that the death has been violent, and have launched an investigation.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the rights organization Justice that his client was refused proper medical care to such an extent as to constitute an intent towards her “physical destruction.”

According to a press release from the organization, medics had diagnosed the businesswoman with severe diabetes and had determined that she had only one working kidney.

Zherebenkov explained that Trifonova’s health began to sharply declined when she was arrested in December 2009 and placed in Matrosskaya Tishina. When she complained that her lungs were filling with liquid, she was brushed off and told to “sleep standing up.” After demands by her lawyer, Trifonova was eventually moved to a Moscow city hospital, where she immediately recovered. Doctors at the hospital confirmed that Trifonova required specialized treatment that included regular cleansings of her blood – a procedure not possible at the detention facility.

At that point, says the lawyer, Investigator Sergei Pysin told Trifonova that she would get different accommodations if she plead guilty to the fraud she was charged with. The woman refused, and despite doctors’ orders that Trifonova not leave the hospital even for investigative proceedings, Pysin brought her back to Matrosskaya Tishina.

Zherebenkov believes that Pysin had at that point prepared a medical document from Matrosskaya Tishina doctors declaring Trifonova’s condition to be stable and fit for investigative proceedings. On the basis of that document, he says, Odintsovsky Court judge Olga Makarova turned down Trifonova’s April 16 request to be released on bail, and instead extended her detention for another three months.

That same day, the press release goes on, a decision was made to move Trifonova to a female penal colony in Mozhaysk, seventy miles west of Moscow. Officials at the penal colony refused to admit her, however, and she was taken to the Mozhaysk city hospital. According to Zherebenkov, doctors at the hospital did not know how to help the woman because they lacked the proper equipment to cleanse her blood, a procedure that she needed two to three times a week.

In the days that followed, the investigator repeatedly promised the Zherebenkov that they would find some way to move Trifonova to a hospital outfitted for her condition. But in the meantime, the businesswoman’s condition was quickly deteriorating. On April 26, the lawyer resorted to using an ambulance rented by Trifonova’s relatives to bring her to a local medical institute to undergo treatment.

Trifonova was finally brought back to Matrosskaya Tishina on April 29, and was supposed to have been brought back to the original hospital in Moscow today. As is now obvious, it was already too late.

“They purposefully destroyed her, and sent her to the Mozhaysk prison so that she would die there,” says Zherebenkov. He believes that the investigator “filled the order” of one of Trifonova’s business partners who owed her several million dollars.

According to RIA Novosti, officials from the Federal Penitentiary Service responded to the lawyer’s accusations that Trifonova was denied medical care by referring to the fact that the paperwork ordering her to undergo medical evaluation had needed to be signed by the investigator “who disappeared somewhere and we were unable to get in touch with him.”

Zherebenkov says he plans to file a criminal suit against Pysin and appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. “Vera Trifonova repeated the fate of Sergei Magnitsky, because our SIZOs are instruments of torture and a means to pressure people,” he said.

The press release from Justice, the main source of information for this article, is available in Russian by clicking here.

Russian prisons have a historically high rate of violence, in part resulting from the rare practice of housing convicts together without regard for the severity of their crimes. While the government has finally decided put that practice to an end, the deputy prosecutor general said that facility reviews ordered by President Dmitri Medvedev exposed a significant number of cases where prison guards have abused both their own authority and the rights of prisoners.

“In facilities in the Omskaya, Orenburgskaya, Sverdlovskaya, and Chelyabinskaya regions, as well as several others, personnel have been using physical force and tactical equipment in ways that are not always lawful or well-founded,” said Zabarchuk.

When asked about conditions regarding prisoners’ health, the deputy painted a grim picture of the situation: In 2009 alone, 4150 prisoners had died in Russian correctional facilities. “What’s worrying is not only the high rate of disease, but the depressing death rate among convicts,” he said. “This is a problem that I would particularly like to single out, since the basic prison contingent is not made up of very old men or young children, but able-bodied people who are, you could say, in the prime of their lives and strength. Nevertheless, many of them do not live out their sentences, or they leave disabled.”

One reason for the mortality rate was the failure of correctional facilities to provide prisoners with proper medical care. And even when they do, said Zabarchuk, medical equipment is outdated and medical personnel often lack the proper education for their jobs.

However, said Zabarchuk, a series of recent prison reforms have succeeded in decreasing the number of prisoners overall. This was a key task for the penal system’s management, as a sharp increase in female prisoners has recently contributed to the already overwhelming overcrowding of Russia’s facilities. A recent decision by the Russian Supreme Court regarding procedures for bail, house arrest, parole, and other lighter forms of punishment has allowed more convicts to carry out their sentences outside of correctional facilities. As a result, the number of prisoners in Russia was 861,687 prisoners as of Spring 2010 – 29 thousand less than a year ago. Zabarchuk said that the decrease can be credited to the fact that, for the first time ever, the problem of abuse in Russian correctional facilities was being dealt with at the highest levels of government, with president Medvedev in particular pushing for reform.

Even so, the situation in Russia’s prisons remains dire, and not all reforms necessarily have any chance of success. Zabarchuk blamed the Federal Penitentiary Service itself for “ineffectively exercising departmental control” over rampant corruption. “Therefore, the negative situation that has developed is not changing,” he concluded.

Russian prisoners themselves have made a number of recent attempts to draw attention to the conditions of their treatment. In January 2010, prisoners in the southern Rostovskaya region announced an indefinite hunger strike in response to what they said were irresponsible medical personnel and other rights abuses. In November 2009, five prisoners in the Chelyabinskaya region wrote a letter to law enforcement agencies alleging continuous beatings and psychological abuse from prison guards, and also went on hunger strike.