MOSCOW, January 23 (RAPSI) – The number of individuals held in custody in Russia has decreased by 40,000 in 2019 as compared with the figures registered in the same period of 2018, and makes at the moment 523,900, according to Russia’s ombudsman Tatiana Moskalkova.

The observed dynamics, Moskalkova noted, were a result of liberalization and humanization of the criminal law. In particular, the rights commissioner stressed a role the adoption of a law envisaging that one day of pre-trial detention was to be counted as 1.5 days served in a penal colony,  2 days spent in a penal settlement, or 1 day served in a prison or in high- and maximum-security penal colonies  had played in supporting this trend.

When addressing the panel conference on criminal law development strategies in the 21st century, the ombudsman cited the statistics of applications she had received: most of them, 30%, concerned criminal and criminal procedure laws, where citizens complained about too long and incomplete investigations (4,961 in 2019); alleged that sentences given were unjustified or unfair (4,301); sought recognition that pretrial measures applied were disproportional (662); other complaints concerned misclassification of crimes, use of inadequate evidence, and unfair punishments.