The Zhoghovurd daily of the Republic of Armenia (RA) writes as follows, in particular: Over the past year, 27 people have died in Armenia’s penitentiaries. ArmLur.am was officially informed by an RA MJ [i.e. Ministry of Justice] penitentiary that 10 were suicide cases, and 17 prisoners died as a result of health problems, with diseases that in many cases were clearly incompatible with being kept in detention conditions.

These numbers are not just statistics. They are 27 human destinies and 27 questions for the state, the answers to which have not been given to this day. What is most worrying is that both the judges who applied detention and the medical staff of the penitentiaries were aware of these diseases. Moreover, many of those who died in prison were not even convicted; they were in pretrial detention, when the presumption of innocence was still in effect, but this right did not save them from death.

Of course, the law seems to have foreseen everything. Article 10, Part 1, Clause 5 of the RA Penitentiary Code guarantees the right of a detainee to receive medical assistance. Clause 101 of RA Government Resolution No. 825 of May 26, 2006 also provides for the opportunity to use the services of specialists from a civilian medical institution of one’s own choice. However, these legal guarantees very often remain only on paper, and in reality the detainee is deprived of the medical care necessary to preserve the right to life.

Of course, the Minister of Justice Srbuhi Galyan declares about the “reformed penitentiary system,” “human-centered policy,” and that a person is the highest value in Armenia. At that moment, the question arises: is this the same Armenia where an average of three people die in prison every month? If 27 deaths were recorded in prisons in any European country during a year, that topic would become a subject of serious political and legal discussion. In Armenia, however, silence prevails. (...).

(...). The most painful, however, is that after these deaths there is no accountability, there are no systemic assessments, there are no officials who answer why it was possible to prevent these deaths, but they nevertheless occurred. If the state is unable to ensure the protection of the life and health of a person under its full supervision, then this is no longer an isolated tragedy, but a systemic failure.

A penitentiary is a place to serve a sentence or a preventive measure, not a death waiting room.