MOSCOW, April 13 (RAPSI) – Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council has voiced its opinion that courts need to resume hearings on paroles, mitigating of punishments and transfers to corrective labor in order to bar riots in detention facilities, the body’s press-service informs on Monday.

Earlier, the Council’s standing commission on assistance to the Public Monitoring Commission, reform of the penitentiary system and crime prevention has held a working meeting to discuss the causes and circumstances of a riot in a penal colony situated in the Irkutsk Region, and the activities of public monitoring commissions at the time of the pandemic.

Rights activists believe it necessary to seek permission for the members of the Irkutsk regional public monitoring commission to visit the affected penal colony and to ask Russia’s Investigative Committee to thoroughly check the allegations of unlawful use of force against convicts in this penitentiary facility, what they think could provoke the riot, the statement reads.

Among the measures members of the Council propose to prevent further riots are those ensuring convicts could have access to video and telephone communications, extending a special mail system to some regional penitentiary establishments, and permitting those serving terms in penal settlements to reside in residential areas of the locations such settlements are situated in.

The Council also insists the penitentiary establishments are to be obliged to publish data on actual numbers of convicts, available places and the limits on their respective capacities; on salaries, among those paid from the state budget, as well as information on the number and types of incentives and penalties given to convicts.