Sebastien, who leads the #FreeJimmyLai campaign, last saw his father in August 2020 — weeks after Beijing imposed a national security law that led to a massive crackdown on pro-democracy advocates and journalists. Among them Lai, founder of the now-shuttered pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily.

After nearly four years in Hong Kong’s maximum-security Stanley Prison and multiple delays to his trial, the aging British citizen was due to take the stand for the first time on November 20 on charges of sedition and conspiring to collude with foreign forces, which he denies.

Lai, who has diabetes, routinely spends over 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, with only 50 minutes for restricted exercise and limited access to daylight, according to his international lawyers.

The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has found that Lai is unlawfully and arbitrarily detained and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for his release.

Responding to CPJ’s request for comment, a Hong Kong government spokesperson referred to a November 17 statement in which it said that Lai was “receiving appropriate treatment and care in prison” and that Hong Kong authorities “strongly deplore any form of interference.”

In an interview with CPJ, Sebastien spoke about Britain’s bilateral ties with China, as well as Hong Kong — a former British colony where his father arrived as a stowaway on a fishing boat at age 12, before finding jobs in a garment factory and eventually launched a clothing retail chain and his media empire.

What do you anticipate when your father takes the stand for the first time?

To be honest, I do not know. My father is a strong person, but the Hong Kong government has spent four years trying to break him. I don’t think they can break his spirit but with his treatment they are in the process of breaking his body. We will see the extent of that on the stand.

Your father turned 77 recently. How is he doing in solitary confinement?

The last time I saw my father was in August of 2020. I haven’t been able to return to my hometown since and therefore have been unable to visit him in prison. His health has declined significantly. He is now 77, and, having spent nearly four years in a maximum-security prison in solitary confinement, his treatment is inhumane. For his dedication to freedom, they have taken his away.

For his bravery in standing in defense of others, they have denied him human contact. For his strong faith in God, they have denied him Holy Communion.

We have seen governments across the political spectrum call for Jimmy Lai’s release —the U.S., the European Parliament, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Ireland, among others. What does that mean to you?

We are incredibly grateful for all the support from multiple states in calling for my father’s release. The charges against my father are sham charges. The Hong Kong government has weaponized their legal system to crack down on all who criticize them.

You met with the U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently, who said Jimmy Lai’s case remains a priority and the government will press for consular access. What would you like to see Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government do?

They have publicly stated that they want to normalize relationships with China and to increase trade. I don’t see how that can be achieved if there is a British citizen in Hong Kong in the process of being killed for standing up for the values that underpin a free nation and the rights and dignity of its citizens.

Any normalization of the relationship with China needs to be conditional on my father’s immediate release and his return to the United Kingdom.

Your father’s life story in many ways embodies Hong Kong’s ‘never-give-up’ attitude. Do you think Hong Kong journalists and pro-democracy activists will keep on fighting? What is your message to Beijing and the Hong Kong government?

I think most of the world shares his spirit. Hong Kong is unique because it’s a city of refugees. It’s a city where we were given many of the freedoms of the free world. And as a result, it flourished. We knew what we had and what we escaped from.

My message is to release my father immediately. A Hong Kong that has 1,900 political prisoners for democracy campaigning, is a Hong Kong that has no rule of law, no free press, one that disregards the welfare of its citizens. This is not a Hong Kong that will flourish.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Beh Lih Yi.

The law says the disciplinary period for violating a prison’s rules is only 10 days.

The 33-year-old campaigned against the Formosa Plastics Group steel factory, which polluted the water supply by discharging waste in 2016.

He was arrested in 2022 on charges of “conducting anti-state propaganda” and was sentenced to five years and six months in prison in a trial without a lawyer.

Hung was sent to serve his sentence at Nam Ha Prison in the province of the same name and only allowed limited family visits.

Last August, his father Nguyen Sen was refused a prison visit and told Hung was being disciplined for receiving noodles from a fellow political prisoner.

After RFA’s Vietnamese service wrote about the incident in December, Hung’s father was allowed to visit.

Last month, Sen returned to the prison, and discovered that his son was still being held in solitary confinement as punishment for the 2022 incident.  

He said his son was weak and pale due to being confined in his cell for a long time. Hung also suffers from stomach problems and headaches due to a childhood accident, he said.

Hung is shortsighted but the prison won’t allow him to use his metal-framed spectacles. Although the family sent plastic-framed glasses, the prison said they didn’t receive them, making it difficult for Hung to see.

Hung told his father that the family could only visit him once every two months in accordance with regulations for disciplined prisoners. 

Even though Sen registered his phone number with prison authorities he never received a call from his son even though regulations allow inmates to call their family for 10 minutes a month.

Hung told his family to help him hire two lawyers, but he did not specify what they were for, only saying he would present evidence to them when at the prison. It is unclear whether Hung will be able to meet with a lawyer because, according to regulations, only relatives can meet with prisoners.

RFA’s calls to Nam Ha Prison went unanswered.

According to Article 43 of the Law on Execution of Criminal Judgments (2015), prisoners who violate detention facility rules can be reprimanded, warned or detained in a disciplinary cell for up to 10 days. While held in solitary, prisoners are not allowed to meet their relatives.

“Vietnam’s rights-abusing practices include trying to censor, or failing that, arrest and imprison anyone who dares criticize the government, and that’s precisely what the authorities are doing to Nguyen Duc Hung,” Human Rights Watch Deputy Asia Director Phil Robertson told RFA.

“But it is unusually cruel for them to hold him in virtually indefinite solitary confinement.

“The government should recognize that Nguyen Duc Hung did nothing wrong in the first place because exercising freedom of expression should not be considered a crime, and they should release him immediately and unconditionally,” he said.

Nguyen Viet Dung, who was held in solitary confinement for more than two years at Nam Ha Prison and has now fled the country, said that each individual disciplinary sentence has a duration of three months, however, the prison can consecutively apply disciplinary sentences to a prisoner.

Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

The findings from RFE/RL's Russian Service corroborate earlier statements from Ukrainian military officials, underscoring how Kyiv's ability to secure its command communications is potentially threatened.

It comes as Ukrainian forces grapple with depleted weaponry and ammunition, and overall exhaustion, with Russian forces pressing localized offensives in several locations along the 1,200-kilometer front line. The industrial city of Avdiyivka, in particular, is under severe strain with Russian forces making steady advances, threatening to encircle Ukrainian defenses there.

Ukraine has relied heavily on Starlink, a network for low-orbit satellites that provide high-speed Internet access. The network is owned by SpaceX, the private space company that is in turn owned by Musk, the American billionaire entrepreneur.

They are used on the front line primarily for stable communications between units, medics, and commanders. Ukrainian troops have also experimented with installing Starlink antennas on large attack drones, which are an essential tool for Ukrainian troops but are frequently jammed by Russian electronic-warfare systems.

However, a growing number of Ukrainian military sources and civilian activists have pointed to evidence that Russian troops are using the network, either for their own communications or to potentially monitor Ukraine's.

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On February 11, Ukraine's military intelligence service, known as HUR, said Russian forces were not only using Starlink terminals but also doing it in a "systemic" way. HUR also published an audio excerpt of what it said was an intercepted exchange between two Russian soldiers discussing how to set up the terminals.

Units like Russia's 83rd Air Assault Brigade, which is fighting in the partially occupied eastern region of Donetsk, are reportedly using the system, HUR spokesman Andriy Yusov was quoted as saying.

Ukraine's Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said on February 13 that Russia was acquiring Starlink terminals from unnamed Arab countries.

Starlink has said that it does not do business with Russia's government or its military, and Musk himself published a statement on his social-media company X, formerly Twitter, in response to the Ukrainian assertions.

"A number of false news reports claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia. This is categorically false. To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia," Musk wrote on February 11.

Russian troops may have acquired Starlink terminals from one of potentially dozens of companies within Russia that claim to sell them alongside household products, RFE/RL found.

One Russian website, called Topmachines.ru, advertised a Starlink set for 220,000 rubles (about $2,200), and a $100 monthly subscription fee.

Starlink appears to have lax oversight on the type of personal data used by new Starlink clients when they register for the first time, as well.

One Moscow-based reseller told RFE/RL that new accounts were registered with random European first and last names and that there is no need to enter a valid European passport. The only important thing, the vendor said, is to have a valid bank card that uses one of the main international payment systems.

Another vendor told RFE/RL that the terminals he sold were brought in from Europe, though he declined to specify which country. The vendor said a terminal costs 250,000 rubles (about $2,400), and the monthly fee was 14,000 rubles.

Additionally, Starlink's technology appears to be incapable of precisely restricting signal access; independent researchers say Starlink's system only knows the approximate location of its terminals, meaning it would have to restrict access for Ukrainian frontline positions in order to limit Russian battlefield use.

IStories, an independent Russian news outlet, also identified at least three vendors in Moscow who claim to sell Starlink terminals.

Asked by reporters whether Russian troops might be using Starlink terminals, Peskov said: "This is not a certified system with us, therefore, it cannot be supplied and is not supplied officially. Accordingly, we cannot use it officially in any way."

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

U.S. immigration authorities locked thousands of people in solitary confinement in 2023 as the United States continues to flout international human rights standards in its sprawling network of immigration detention facilities.

A new report by Harvard University-affiliated researchers and the nonprofit group Physicians for Human Rights found the dangerous confinements have not only persisted over the past decade, but also increased in frequency and duration under the Biden administration.

The report highlights the gap between President Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric and the lived reality of an estimated 3,000 immigrant detainees held in isolation last year, often for prolonged periods — a practice that the United Nations warned can amount to torture.

“This is a sheer failure of the Biden administration to stop egregious human rights abuses,” Tessa Wilson, a senior program officer for Physicians for Human Rights and a co-author of the report, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ. “The use of solitary confinement is actually only increasing.”

The adverse effects of solitary confinement — generally defined as isolation without meaningful human interaction for 22 hours a day or more — are well documented. It can cause extreme psychological and emotional distress, and lead to sleeplessness, chronic depression, hallucinations, self-harm, and suicidal impulses.

In the U.S., home to the world’s largest immigration detention system, solitary confinement has become a go-to tool to manage the swelling number of detained immigrants. More than 38,000 people, including long-term U.S. residents and people seeking asylum, were in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as of January 28, 2024.

In 2019, ICIJ and The Intercept published Solitary Voices, an investigation that examined the misuse and overuse of solitary confinement, labeled “segregation,” in detention centers under the agency’s control. A review of more than 8,400 internal ICE incident reports from 2012 to 2017 revealed that many detainees were placed in isolation cells for weeks or months at a time, including people with preexisting mental illnesses and other vulnerabilities.

The investigation found that solitary confinement was used to punish some detainees for offenses as minor as consensual kissing or giving haircuts to one another. ICE also segregated hunger strikers, LGBTQ+ people, and people with disabilities.

One of ICE’s directives acknowledges that isolating detainees — who aren’t considered prisoners and aren’t held for punitive reasons under federal law — is “a serious step that requires careful consideration of alternatives.” And yet the new report found the agency recorded more than 14,000 solitary confinement cases from 2018 to 2023.

Researchers said the number is likely an undercount due to ICE’s poor recordkeeping. They filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, beginning in 2017, to obtain the relevant data from ICE and other agencies, and eventually resorted to litigation.

The average length of the recorded confinements was 27 days, researchers found, stretching well beyond the 15-day period that meets the threshold for “inhuman and degrading treatment” defined by the U.N. special rapporteur on torture. The data revealed dozens of examples of facilities holding people in solitary confinement for over a year.

Through more than two dozen interviews with detainees, researchers also gathered accounts of the grueling conditions inside isolation cells. Interviewees described cells that were freezing cold; constantly lit, causing sleep deprivation; or had toilets only guards could flush.

“The light is on 24 hours a day … the guards wouldn’t dim or turn them off at times,” an unnamed 30-year-old female former detainee told the researchers. “We went crazy.”

Echoing ICIJ and The Intercept’s previous findings, researchers found that solitary confinement was often used as a disciplinary measure for minor infractions and to segregate transgender detainees in “a pattern of systemic discrimination and neglect that contravenes ICE’s own policies.”

Since 2019, the number of detainees with recorded mental health conditions placed in solitary confinement jumped from 35 percent to 56 percent in 2023, the report states. U.N. experts have warned specifically about the grave dangers of isolating people with mental illness.

Mike Alvarez, a spokesperson for ICE, said that the agency had not yet received the report and declined to answer specific questions about it. But he defended the agency’s practices in an emailed statement.

“More than 15 internal and external entities provide oversight of ICE detention facilities to ensure detainees reside in safe, secure, and humane environments, and under appropriate conditions of confinement,” Alvarez said. “The agency continuously reviews and enhances civil detention operations to ensure noncitizens are treated humanely, protected from harm, provided appropriate medical and mental health care, and receive the rights and protections to which they are entitled.”

“Inappropriate and Inhumane”

The new report also highlights ICE’s troubling use of solitary confinement for “medical isolation” of detainees who are sick, disabled, or experiencing a mental health crisis.

“ICE’s failure to ensure adequate medical resources in detention centers created life-threatening conditions for immigrants in solitary confinement,” the report states.

Katherine Peeler, a co-author of the report and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said that in many of the cases researchers reviewed, ICE should have sent detainees to outside medical facilities.

“Every ICE detention center has a relationship with a local hospital, so there’s always a better option than solitary confinement,” she said. “The conflation of medical isolation and solitary confinement is inappropriate and inhumane.”

The report is a collaboration between Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Law School, and Physicians for Human Rights.

In 2019, ICIJ and The Intercept identified at least 373 instances of detainees being placed in isolation due to suicide risk — and another 200-plus cases of people already in solitary confinement being moved to “suicide watch” or other forms of observation, often in altered solitary cells.

“This is the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire,” Kenneth Appelbaum, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who has examined ICE’s segregation practices as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said at the time.

“A Tipping Point”

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have publicly acknowledged concerns over the widespread use of solitary confinement by ICE but have done little to fix the problem.

As a candidate, Biden pledged to end the use of solitary confinement. His proposed ban, as outlined on his campaign website, would have “very limited exceptions such as protecting the life of an imprisoned person.”

Likewise, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, also advocated for ending solitary confinement. In late 2019, Harris, along with other senators, introduced extensive legislation that would outlaw locking detainees in solitary confinement in most instances as a punishment. The bill did not advance.

The new report is not the first time the Biden administration has been criticized for its handling of solitary confinement in its immigration detention centers.

In 2022, whistleblower Ellen Gallagher, a supervisor within the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the vast U.S. immigration detention apparatus, told ICIJ that there “continues to be a stunning level of inaction.” She said she was “not aware of any systemic change in this area” at that time.

Gallagher first went public with her concerns about ICE detention policies in interviews with ICIJ and The Intercept as part of the 2019 investigation. “People were being brutalized,” Gallagher said at the time.

She expressed dismay at the new report’s findings.

“As this report makes clear, despite a plethora of data displaying profound human suffering, existing executive and legislative oversight mechanisms have failed to stop this madness,” Gallagher said. “If there is a tipping point, I hope it’s now.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Spencer Woodman.

Yandex, once dubbed Russia’s Google for becoming the country’s dominant online search engine, will exit Russia entirely, selling its assets there in a deeply discounted $5.2 billion deal that marks the end of an era.

Under the agreement announced on February 5 by Yandex’s Netherlands-based corporate parent, a “purchaser consortium” that includes the company’s management, an investment fund linked to Russian oil giant LUKoil, and three other businessmen will take over Yandex’s operations inside Russia.

The Russian entity, meanwhile, takes over the vast bulk of the company’s revenue-generating businesses, including the country’s dominant search engine, and also major operations in things like online shopping, advertising, food delivery, taxis, maps, and other things.

The Dutch parent is expected to retain control of several non-Russian businesses, including operations in cloud computing, self-driving cars, and a number of patents and other intellectual property licenses.

The price takes into account a 50 percent discount mandated by law on the sale of assets of companies from "unfriendly countries" when they exit the local market.

“Since February 2022, the Yandex group and our team have faced exceptional challenges. We believe that we have found the best possible solution for our shareholders, our teams, and our users in these extraordinary circumstances,” Yandex’s board Chairman John Boynton said in a statement.

February 2022 is when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which sparked the exit of dozens of international companies from their Russian operations.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov welcomed news of the sale.

“Yandex is one of the economy’s national champions in high tech and one of the largest companies,” he told reporters. “It’s important for us that the company continues to work in the country.”

Yandex was a long-admired company, in and out of Russia, not only for its search-engine dominance but its innovations and fast-moving efforts to move into lucrative online businesses such as ride hailing and food delivery. Its shares, which traded on the U.S. Nasdaq exchange, were held by major Western institutional investors.

The announcement caps a tumultuous 18-month period since the Kremlin’s decision to launch its large-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the wake of the invasion, Russian lawmakers passed measures that amount to censorship of news and independent information about the war, which the Kremlin euphemistically calls a “special military operation.”

In the weeks that followed, Yandex, whose search engine and news portals were a major source of information for Russians, came under pressure to skew search results, and direct readers to only specified news outlets.

Two board members resigned; several top executives departed, along with thousands of employees; and the company’s American Depositary Receipts, traded on the U.S. Nasdaq exchange, were frozen. The company decided to sell its news and entertainment channels.

Months later, Yandex announced a plan for a wholesale reorganization, with a possible exit from Russia. Aleksei Kudrin, a former finance minister and longtime Kremlin confidant viewed as a “liberal” policymaker, was brought on to help negotiate the restructuring.

But the talks faltered as reports emerged that powerful Kremlin-linked oligarchs were in the running to take it over, and Yandex’s board feared Western sanctions imposed after the Russian invasion might pose legal problems. Kudrin himself ended up being sanctioned by the United States, while the company’s co-founder, Arkady Volozh, who resigned months after the invasion, was hit with European Union sanctions.

The negotiations were complicated further last August when Volozh publicly criticized the Ukraine war, calling it “barbaric.”

Aside from LUKoil and the stake to be held by management, the other three Russian members of the “purchaser consortium” are relatively unknown. One previously was an executive at Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas giant.

None of the buyers are “a target of, or owned or controlled by a target of, sanctions in the U.S., EU, U.K., or Switzerland,” the company said.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

An additional 25 people were injured in the strike on the suburb of Tekstilshchik, including two teenagers, said Denis Pushilin, who accused the Ukrainian military of firing the shells.

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He blamed Ukraine for the attack, calling it a "horrific" artillery strike on a civilian area.

Ukrainian shelling of a separate neighborhood in the city killed one person, Pushilin said, bringing the total number of dead in occupied Donetsk to 28.

According to Aleksei Kulemzin, Donetsk city's Russian-installed mayor, Ukrainian forces bombarded a busy area where shops and a market are located.

Pushilin announced a day of mourning on January 22 in the so-called Donetsk People's Republic, the name given to the part of the region Russia says it has annexed.

Kyiv has not commented on the event, and the claims of the Russian-installed officials in Donetsk could not be independently verified.

The Russian Foreign Ministry blamed the strike on Ukraine and described it as a “terrorist attack.”

“These terrorist attacks by the Kyiv regime clearly demonstrate its lack of political will toward achieving peace and the settlement of this conflict by diplomatic means,” it said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy posted a message on X, formerly Twitter, saying that thousands of people would still be alive today if Moscow had not launched the war but did not mention the strike against occupied Donetsk.

"Russia must feel and realize forever that the aggressor loses the most as a result of aggression," he said, adding that on January 21 more than 100 Ukrainian cities, towns, and villages in nine regions had been shelled and, unfortunately, there were dead and wounded.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “strongly condemns all attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, including today’s shelling of the city of Donetsk in Ukraine,” according to a UN spokesperson, adding that all such attacks are prohibited under international humanitarian law.

The Donetsk regional military administration, meanwhile, said one person was killed and another was wounded as a result of shelling by Russian troops of Kurakhovo on January 21.

Vadym Filashkin accused the Russian troops of aiming at residential buildings, adding that a 31-year-old man died at the scene.

A kindergarten and several private houses were damaged by the impact, and a fire broke out, which the rescuers have already extinguished, Filashkin said on Telegram.

Earlier on January 21, the Russian Defense Ministry announced a missile attack on the occupied Crimea.

Russian anti-aircraft missiles allegedly shot down three missiles over the Black Sea near the western coast of the Russian-occupied peninsula, the ministry said on Telegram.

Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Russian-installed governor of the Ukrainian peninsula seized by Moscow in 2014, said at the time that air-defense forces had "shot down an aerial target" over the Black Sea.

Prior to the statement, an RFE/RL correspondent reported an air raid and three explosions in Sevastopol.

On the front line, Russian forces took control of the village of Krokhmalne in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on January 21.

Ukrainian forces confirmed that the settlement had been occupied, but Volodymyr Fityo, spokesman for Ukrainian Ground Forces Command, said Kyiv’s troops had been pulled back to pre-prepared reserve positions.

He said Krokhmalne had a population of roughly 45 people before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. “That’s five houses, probably,” he was quoted as saying by Ukrainian news outlet Hromadske. “Our main goal is to save the lives of Ukraine’s defenders.”

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says he was immediately placed in a punitive solitary confinement cell after finishing a quarantine term at the so-called Polar Wolf prison in Russia's Arctic region where he was transferred last month.

In a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, Navalny said on January 9 a prison guard ruled that "convict Navalny refused to introduce himself according to format, did not respond to the educational work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself" and therefore must spend seven days in solitary confinement.

Navalny added that unlike in a regular cell, where inmates are allowed to have a walk outside of the cell in the afternoon when it is a bit warmer outside, in the punitive cell, such walks are at 6:30 a.m. in a part of the world where temperatures can fall to minus 45 degrees Celsius or colder.

"I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is," Navalny said in an irony-laced series of eight posts, adding that the cell-like sites for walks are "11 steps from the wall and 3 steps to the wall" with an open sky covered with metal bars above.

"It's never been colder here than -32 degrees Celsius (-25 degrees Fahrenheit). Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears, and fingers," Navalny joked, comparing himself with the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant film, who saved himself from freezing in the cold by crawling inside the carcass of a dead horse.

"Here you need an elephant. A hot or even roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant [here], especially at 6:30 in the morning? So, I will continue to freeze," Navalny concludes in his sarcastic string of messages.

Navalny was transported in December to the notorious and remote prison, formally known as IK-3, but widely referred to as Polar Wolf.

Some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, the prison holds about 1,050 of Russia's most incorrigible prisoners.

Human rights activists say the prison holds serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, repeat offenders, and others convicted of the most serious crimes and serving sentences of 20 years or more.

In some cases, like Navalny's, the government sends convicts who are widely considered to be political prisoners there as well. Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was convicted of tax evasion and other charges during the dismantling of the Yukos oil giant, spent about two years at IK-3 in the mid-2000s.

The prison was founded in 1961 at a former camp of dictator Josef Stalin's Gulag network. The settlement of Kharp, with about 5,000 people, mostly provides housing and services for prison workers and administrators.

Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison in August 2023 on extremism charges, on top of previous sentences for fraud. He says the charges are politically motivated, and human rights organizations recognized him as a political prisoner.

He has posed one of the most-serious threats to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who recently announced he is running for reelection in March. Putin is expected to easily win the election amid the continued sidelining of opponents and a clampdown on opposition and civil society that intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Navalny survived a poisoning with Novichok-type nerve agent in 2020 that he says was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin has denied any role in Navalny's poisoning.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says he was immediately placed in a punitive solitary confinement cell after finishing a quarantine term at the so-called Polar Wolf prison in Russia's Arctic region where he was transferred last month.

In a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, Navalny said on January 9 a prison guard ruled that "convict Navalny refused to introduce himself according to format, did not respond to the educational work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself" and therefore must spend seven days in solitary confinement.

Navalny added that unlike in a regular cell, where inmates are allowed to have a walk outside of the cell in the afternoon when it is a bit warmer outside, in the punitive cell, such walks are at 6:30 a.m. in a part of the world where temperatures can fall to minus 45 degrees Celsius or colder.

"I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is," Navalny said in an irony-laced series of eight posts, adding that the cell-like sites for walks are "11 steps from the wall and 3 steps to the wall" with an open sky covered with metal bars above.

"It's never been colder here than -32 degrees Celsius (-25 degrees Fahrenheit). Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears, and fingers," Navalny joked, comparing himself with the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant film, who saved himself from freezing in the cold by crawling inside the carcass of a dead horse.

"Here you need an elephant. A hot or even roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant [here], especially at 6:30 in the morning? So, I will continue to freeze," Navalny concludes in his sarcastic string of messages.

Navalny was transported in December to the notorious and remote prison, formally known as IK-3, but widely referred to as Polar Wolf.

Some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, the prison holds about 1,050 of Russia's most incorrigible prisoners.

Human rights activists say the prison holds serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, repeat offenders, and others convicted of the most serious crimes and serving sentences of 20 years or more.

In some cases, like Navalny's, the government sends convicts who are widely considered to be political prisoners there as well. Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was convicted of tax evasion and other charges during the dismantling of the Yukos oil giant, spent about two years at IK-3 in the mid-2000s.

The prison was founded in 1961 at a former camp of dictator Josef Stalin's Gulag network. The settlement of Kharp, with about 5,000 people, mostly provides housing and services for prison workers and administrators.

Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison in August 2023 on extremism charges, on top of previous sentences for fraud. He says the charges are politically motivated, and human rights organizations recognized him as a political prisoner.

He has posed one of the most-serious threats to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who recently announced he is running for reelection in March. Putin is expected to easily win the election amid the continued sidelining of opponents and a clampdown on opposition and civil society that intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Navalny survived a poisoning with Novichok-type nerve agent in 2020 that he says was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin has denied any role in Navalny's poisoning.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Kremlin critic Aleksei Navalny says he was immediately placed in a punitive solitary confinement cell after finishing a quarantine term at the so-called Polar Wolf prison in Russia's Arctic region where he was transferred last month.

In a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, Navalny said on January 9 a prison guard ruled that "convict Navalny refused to introduce himself according to format, did not respond to the educational work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself" and therefore must spend seven days in solitary confinement.

Navalny added that unlike in a regular cell, where inmates are allowed to have a walk outside of the cell in the afternoon when it is a bit warmer outside, in the punitive cell, such walks are at 6:30 a.m. in a part of the world where temperatures can fall to minus 45 degrees Celsius or colder.

"I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is," Navalny said in an irony-laced series of eight posts, adding that the cell-like sites for walks are "11 steps from the wall and 3 steps to the wall" with an open sky covered with metal bars above.

"It's never been colder here than -32 degrees Celsius (-25 degrees Fahrenheit). Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you have time to grow a new nose, ears, and fingers," Navalny joked, comparing himself with the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant film, who saved himself from freezing in the cold by crawling inside the carcass of a dead horse.

"Here you need an elephant. A hot or even roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant [here], especially at 6:30 in the morning? So, I will continue to freeze," Navalny concludes in his sarcastic string of messages.

Navalny was transported in December to the notorious and remote prison, formally known as IK-3, but widely referred to as Polar Wolf.

Some 2,000 kilometers northeast of Moscow, the prison holds about 1,050 of Russia's most incorrigible prisoners.

Human rights activists say the prison holds serial killers, rapists, pedophiles, repeat offenders, and others convicted of the most serious crimes and serving sentences of 20 years or more.

In some cases, like Navalny's, the government sends convicts who are widely considered to be political prisoners there as well. Platon Lebedev, a former business partner of Mikhail Khodorkovsky who was convicted of tax evasion and other charges during the dismantling of the Yukos oil giant, spent about two years at IK-3 in the mid-2000s.

The prison was founded in 1961 at a former camp of dictator Josef Stalin's Gulag network. The settlement of Kharp, with about 5,000 people, mostly provides housing and services for prison workers and administrators.

Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in prison in August 2023 on extremism charges, on top of previous sentences for fraud. He says the charges are politically motivated, and human rights organizations recognized him as a political prisoner.

He has posed one of the most-serious threats to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who recently announced he is running for reelection in March. Putin is expected to easily win the election amid the continued sidelining of opponents and a clampdown on opposition and civil society that intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Navalny survived a poisoning with Novichok-type nerve agent in 2020 that he says was ordered by Putin. The Kremlin has denied any role in Navalny's poisoning.

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Solitude for the Romantic movements emerged as a process of disengagement. By withdrawing from the noise of society artistic (creative) potential could be enhanced. Contemplation was often focused on nature or introspection. The work produced in the process, whether in literature or visual arts, created an iconography for human isolation and alienation. At the same time, nature served as a source of potential redemption from all those sources of alienation found in society. Nature in various forms also became a repository of the divine. The paintings of Caspar David Friedrich are well-known examples for this process in the visual arts. The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, is certainly exemplary in the literary arts.

Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1799 and finished it in 1805, although he made several revisions in the course of his life. The poem can be understood as a literary investigation into the forces and events that shaped the personality of the author and his poetical labour. In Book Four he wrote:

When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude-
How potent a mere image of her sway!
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre: hermit,
Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot
Is treading, where no other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless wastes.[1]

Wordsworth began as a great supporter of the French Revolution and ended greatly disappointed by it. The poem examines the path that transformed him into a revolutionary and led him away from revolution in the end. The revolution had promised to reorganise society along principles of equality as articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Wordsworth and others felt it had failed. The dictatorship and imperial ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte were proof that it was impossible to create a society based on New Testament equality by removing the divinely ordained monarchy.

It is important to add here that these judgements were based on reports scarcely more circumspect than found in today’s mass media. Wordsworth would not have been able to see the results of the Jacobin societies in the provinces or to measure the violence with which the changes introduced were opposed by the counter-revolution with its foreign supporters. The rejection of the French Revolution by much of the English intellectual caste and England’s emergent cultural power in the 19th century constitute a bias which still overshadows the appreciation of the 1789 revolution beyond the English-speaking world. Even today very little attention is given to the counter-revolution and foreign intervention. Almost all school and university texts focus on the Jacobins and the so-called Terror, although the “White Terror” killed substantially more people.

At the same time the foundation of what we once recognized as modern science, evolving as it did from the same cultural context, emerged as the product of solitary investigation. In fact by the end of the 19th century the image of the scientist and the artist merged as solitary investigators, discoverers and innovators were ranked among the upper strata of Western society and the artistic creator/ scientific genius became clichés.

The solitude, whether in science or the arts, was in many ways a recovery of the penitentiary tradition in the Latin Church. In order to discover god and attain grace it was necessary to exercise as close to purity as possible. If artistic or scientific truth approached that of the divine or substituted for it, then it was also to be obtained by the investigator isolated from sources of corruption thus able to perceive pure data. The scientist sought this isolation in research performed in private laboratories that were sometimes associated with university faculties. The concept of academic freedom—a secularization of monastic privileges—was interpreted to assure the necessary solitude for unbiased research and pursuit of truth. Thus although scientific research is inevitably a collective activity, the fiction of solitary research was created by formally isolating the university from daily political and commercial interests.

The artist sought places in the countryside or abandoned his native land for a self-imposed exile or quest. George Gordon Byron’s death in the Greek war of independence in 1824 is only the most notorious.

By the end of the 19th century the literary-artistic and scientific-scholarly caste was endowed with its own ethic and processes for transforming the pure into the true. This ideal was based on a critique of society’s corruption and the striving to transcend it. The bearer of this ideal was to become the autonomous self, solitude incarnate.

Following the defeat of Napoleon the Congress of Vienna not only restored the monarchical system, if somewhat “embourgeoised”, it reinstalled the deification of truth and knowledge as something otherworldly in origin. As Nietzsche observed at the end of the century, god was restored in all but name, while the name of “god” became an empty category, a mere symbol for the will to power.

The emergence of the autonomous Self, whose access to identity and truth derived from exercises in solitude, derived from two traditions. One, already mentioned, was the penitentiary. The individual withdraws from society as a source of sin and by contemplation, absorption and submission to God attains a higher degree of grace and eventually redemption from the sins with which society has soiled him.

The other tradition is that of natural divinity. The individual withdraws in order to contemplate and then engage the creative forces of nature. By comprehending them the artist becomes an agent of creation. Like nature he becomes capable of producing exemplifications of truth. The truth-value of these exemplifications is claimed by virtue of the method applied to create them. This is sometimes called “scientific method” or “artistic creativity”. Until recently it has been assumed that integrity of the respective methods was essential to the value of the product.

The Romantics found that solitude created the conditions by which they could contemplate the problems with which they had been confronted in society. The psychic isolation of the countryside or a foreign environment permitted them to focus on what remained in them when they were no longer influenced by daily social interaction. The longer the isolation continued the more they were exposed to themselves. In some cases this resulted in a “stripping” of their personalities down to the basics, e.g. the interaction of the human with nature unmitigated by social instructions. At some point the artist or scholar would arrive at an essence from which his personality could be redesigned, primarily through the creative or investigative work. The principle can be illustrated simply enough. If anyone has been left alone with a problem long enough, especially one which is highly conventionalized but for which there is no external solution available, there is at least a tendency for the person to use whatever means are at his disposal to solve the problem—even if they are unconventional. If a person is left in a group with the same problem and attempts to use that unconventional method, he will likely feel enormous pressure to abandon it in favour of the approach used by everyone else in the group.

One of the additional products of this solitude, voluntary psychic isolation, is to develop the strength of persona necessary to reproduce the solution created even under social pressure. Thus solitude is not only a strategy for stripping but for clothing the Self. There is certainly enough anecdotal evidence to justify statements like “he is too headstrong because he has been working alone too long.” One of the Romantic contributions to cultural transformation has been the adaptation of solitude to the modern scientific construction of the Self.

The Self as envisioned by the Romantics was a liberated personality, freed from the oppressive social structures and thus able to act as an agent of social transformation. However another Self was developed in response to the revolutionary impulses.

In 2002, British filmmaker Adam Curtis produced a television documentary, roughly based on a book by Stuart Ewen, called The Century of the Self. [2] Curtis’ central thesis is that the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, initiated and for a while led a movement that would turn the concept of the Self into the central instrument of social control in the West. In his study of public relations, the euphemism for propaganda Bernays introduced after World War I, Ewen explains how the culture of the Self was appropriated and exploited by corporate and political communications actors (Business and Government) to produce a society of individuals who believe themselves to be autonomous but are in fact manipulated in their every thought and move. Bernays drew on his uncle’s theories of the unconscious to show that control could be exercised over people by speaking to what they “really” thought and felt as opposed to what they actually said.

Instead of individuals—as the Romantics imagined—creating an authentic Self and entering society to act on the basis of this authenticity, Bernays and his successors devised methods they believed would suggest to the masses of isolated individuals ways they could reconstruct themselves in the interests of those who rule society. This presumed that one could create individuals in isolation that could be sufficiently alienated to engage in searching strategies. The aim was to exploit industrial and especially post-war psychic distress among masses of people whose lives had been irreversibly affected by the world war. These people would be encouraged in their sense of alienation. That alienation would be labelled individualism. The emotional duress would be sustained by graduated fear. This fear was sublimated in the reconstitution of groups of alienated individuals.

Curtis’s 4-episode film continues with a focus on commercial activity. Edward Bernays argued if he was able to produce advertising that would persuade people to go to war and fight he ought to be able to do this to sell products. After World War I ended the US was faced with massive overproduction. There were just too many goods that had been produced just to be wasted in war and now the plant lay idle and the goods collected dust in warehouses. Modern advertising was initiated to move those goods and restore the enormous profitability of wartime industrial manufacturing. He shows that creating desires and fears were complementary aims. On one hand the individual has to be freed from inhibitions like thrift, morality, social responsibility, or just a realistic assessment of his financial condition. The objective impositions of society are to be stripped from him so that he can feel his true nature as a desiring subject. Then he is intensively exposed to the prefabricated objects he ought to desire. This process is stimulated by fear, either the inability to satisfy those desires or the injection of ever more desires for which he has not yet the means of satisfaction. Dissatisfaction and fear are the constant state in which the individual is to be confined. Society does not offer him comfort, whether as routine or sustenance. Instead it exposes him to continuous competition for the satisfaction of the desires cultivated in him during his enforced isolation. Society becomes a machine for enforcing the private desires and the cycles of satisfaction – dissatisfaction, safety – fear that are translated into spending and consumption.

This process of alienation could not have become industrialized without political force. At the same time as individualism was being encouraged, Business and the State were waging vicious war against any genuinely autonomous collectivities like labour unions and popular movements, especially communism in the industrialized world and anti-colonialism/ nationalism among the peoples subjugated by colonial and imperial rule. Although Business was certainly enamoured with Bernays’ approach to mass marketing of products and services, there was also great demand for technologies of the “Self” by state actors.

The State’s interest in the Self, as opposed to the citizen, has not ceased. Curtis shows how the CIA and other covert agencies of the State promoted large-scale experimentation with the technology for creating or modifying the “Self”. One of the most notorious was the work of Dr Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s. There experiments were performed on people who were subjected to pharmaceutical treatment in combination with electro-shocks and various degrees of sensory deprivation. The principle driving this work was that humans could have their consciousness erased and be “reprogrammed” on demand.

Although the Allan Memorial was eventually closed and Dr Cameron’s work denounced, there is no evidence that this kind of involuntary psychic isolation for political and social engineering goals has discontinued. The rudimentary descriptions available of programs run by the CIA and US military at the Guantanamo Detention Center, US Naval Base Guantanamo Cuba since the beginning of the century bear similarities to those run by Dr Cameron so great that they ought to be equally disturbing. Yet despite numerous pledges this center remains in operation with some 700 persons incarcerated at last count.[3]

The mass incarceration, appropriately denoted with prison jargon as “lockdowns”, organized and enforced to varying degrees from March 2020 to the end of 2021 has been excused by medical grounds discredited almost as soon as the public health authorities proposed them. Studies are only beginning to emerge that raise the question: what were the real reasons for these forced isolations, in innumerable cases, solitude and involuntary psychic isolation.

One of Dr Cameron’s experiments was to use covert media, e.g. hidden audio recordings, to introduce thoughts and verbalization to the brain of his presumably erased subject. The recordings would be played during the sleep sessions.

When the first reports and complaints about torture in Guantanamo Detention Center became public there was frequent mention of forced exposure to loud music and audio-visual material the prisoner would presumably find offensive. Sensory deprivation was combined with saturation exposure to foreign stimuli.

During the so-called “lockdowns” I was particularly struck by the closures and domestic incarceration in Portugal. In 2005, I was in Fatima for the first time. My friend and I were amazed at the people assembling there. Cripples of all sorts, people visibly disfigured or disabled by every conceivable illness made their way to the sanctuary. They were on their way to ask for the blessing and healing power of the Holy Virgin, Mother of God. Who knows if any of them had infectious illnesses? The power of the Almighty was present and able to heal. Yet during the mass incarceration the Shrine of Fatima was closed. Had I still been a practicing member of the Latin Church I would have been in uproar. How could the State presume to be more powerful than Our Lord and the Mother of God? How could anyone presume to keep me from the omnipotent divine?

To end, again with Wordsworth:

Oh, yet a few short years of useful life,
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised!
Then, though (too weak to tread the ways of truth)
This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace—knowing what we have learnt to know,
Rich in true happiness if allowed to be
Faithful alike in forwarding a day

Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
Prophets of Nature, we to them speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blessed by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.
(“The Prelude,” Book fourteen, 430-454)

ENDNOTES

[1] William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” cited from The Prelude and other Poems, Alma Classics (2019)

[2] Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, New York, 1996; Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, originally released on BBC Two in 2002. Available on YouTube.

[3] From the time the US Government announced its program of “extraordinary renditions” and incarceration of “terrorists” at its illegally occupied south-eastern Cuba naval station, Guantanamo Bay aka as GITMO, there have been estimates and official claims ranging between 1,500 and 20 over the past two decades. Thus far there is no way to be certain exactly how many prisoners were or are held at this high security naval base. Therefore 700 is considered a conservative number, even if it may exceed current official claims.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

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The post The Harms of Solitary Confinement During Covid appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Christopher Blackwell.

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Each year, hundreds of Army soldiers face trial in military courts for offenses that range from murder to failure to report for duty.

The military justice system largely operates separately from the civilian legal process and is unknown to many Americans. Under the system, commanders, who are not required to be trained lawyers, wield significant influence and can detain soldiers while they are awaiting trial through a process known as pretrial confinement.

The decision to detain a soldier before trial is made by Army commanders. Here is the pretrial confinement rate for:

An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found that soldiers accused of sexual assault are less than half as likely to be placed in pretrial confinement than those accused of offenses like drug use and distribution. Soldiers accused of other more minor offenses such as disobeying an officer or damaging nonmilitary property also have higher rates of pretrial confinement than those accused of sexual assault.

That gap held up even when narrowing in on certain types of sexual assault cases that we suspected might be more likely to result in pretrial confinement.

When we limited the analysis to charges involving the most violent sexual offenses, the pretrial confinement rate remained well below that of drug offenses. (Sexual assault charges include a range of offenses, from rape to nonconsensual contact of body parts like the inner thigh.)

Our analysis also focused on charges, not the outcome of the trial, since the decision to put a soldier in pretrial confinement is made before a case is adjudicated and because guilt is not a requirement for pretrial confinement. But even for soldiers who were eventually found guilty of at least one sexual assault offense, the rate of pretrial confinement remained well below the rate for drug cases, with or without a drug offense conviction.

ProPublica and the Tribune examined nearly 8,400 cases over a decade that went to the Army’s general court-martial and special court-martial, which are sometimes likened to felony and misdemeanor courts, respectively, in the civilian system.

A case was considered to have pretrial confinement if the soldier was held or given credit for at least one day in confinement.

We analyzed the rate of pretrial confinement for the 25 offenses most frequently referred to courts-martial, including sexual assault, drug crimes, physical assault, larceny and being AWOL.

Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

ProPublica and the Tribune spoke with military law experts and individuals familiar with the way Army records are maintained to inform our analysis and review our findings. Experts provided guidance on the accuracy of data fields, informed our approach to standardize charges and helped to vet our findings.

Over time, the military has changed how it charges some offenses. For our analysis, older charges were standardized to the most recent edition of the Manual for Courts-Martial, which guides trial proceedings. We did this by looking at the description of the offense and articles the case was charged under in the Uniform Code of Military Justice at the time an alleged offense took place. (Our analysis focuses on cases that went to courts-martial in the past decade, but a handful of those cases used charges from older editions of the manual.)

For example, the military’s criminal laws used to group certain consensual and nonconsensual sexual acts under the same article when charging soldiers. We aligned these rape and sexual assault charges with the recent edition of the manual and did not count charges related to consensual acts as assault.

We analyzed sexual assault offenses by looking at cases with charges of either sexual assault of an adult or of a child.

Cases with a murder or sexual assault charge were grouped only with their most serious offense. Put another way, if a soldier’s case included both murder and sexual assault charges, our analysis of pretrial confinement grouped it with murder charges, not with sexual assault offenses. And cases that included sexual assault offenses and more minor charges were grouped only with sexual assault.

If a case did not include one of those more serious offenses but had multiple charges, we analyzed pretrial confinement for each charge. For example, if a case included larceny and drug use, it was grouped with the larceny offense and the drug offense cases. This was necessary because beyond murder, homicide and sexual assault, there is not a clear way to rank the roughly 600 offenses by severity.

We also looked at pretrial confinement by trial location. For about 1% of cases, we corrected the trial location because it was entered imprecisely.

We found that the rate of pretrial confinement varied greatly by location. For sexual assault cases, it ranged from just under 4% at Fort Sill in Oklahoma to about 19% at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. We looked at U.S. installations that tried or arraigned at least 20 sexual assault cases and 20 cases of other types, excluding murder.

At 20 of the 29 installations, sexual assault cases had a lower rate of pretrial confinement than other cases that were tried or arraigned.

The percentage of sexual assault cases that included pretrial confinement was lower than other types of cases at most Army posts. Shown are domestic posts that tried or arraigned at least 20 sexual assault and 20 other types of cases in the past decade.

The database is expansive, with trial records from five continents and cases going back to the 1980s. But it has noteworthy limitations.

Military regulations require commanders to consider if lesser restrictions (like requiring regular check-ins) are insufficient before placing a soldier in pretrial confinement. For this story, we could not assess whether individuals received or followed restrictions before confinement because this information was not reliably recorded in the database. Of cases that had pretrial confinement, only 7% noted pretrial restrictions. Our review of case documents revealed instances where soldiers were subject to pretrial restrictions that were not recorded in the database.

We also know that some types of cases are not captured in the database, including cases where a soldier withdrew from military service ahead of arraignment or was punished outside of court. According to the most recent report to Congress on military justice, the Army used nonjudicial punishment in more than 25,000 cases in the past fiscal year. During that time, only about 700 people were arraigned in the branch’s highest trial courts.

We know other offenses are never reported at all. A 2020 Department of Defense report on sexual assault in the military estimates that for every service member who reports a sexual assault, at least two more do not.

ProPublica and the Tribune will continue to investigate the military justice system, which regulates the conduct of more than 1.3 million active-duty service members.

Evidence from trials, nonjudicial punishment and administrative actions are essential to our investigations. Your story is important to us.

Help ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Report on the Military Justice System

Texas Tribune data editor Chris Essig reviewed the analysis.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Ren Larson.

Min Thu Aung, Banya Oo, Ye Htut Khaung and Zaw Win Htut — all students at Hpa-an University in Hpa-n, Kayin state — were arrested in March and charged with defamation of the state, organizing or helping a group to encourage the overthrow or destruction of the Myanmar military, and having contact with an unlawful organization, in this case an ethnic armed group fighting national forces. They each have been sentenced to 12 to 13 years in prison.

The four students were among 60 other political prisoners who were transferred from Hpa-An Prison to Tharrawaddy Prison in Bago region on July 9.

On instructions from the warden at Hpa-an Prison, the students were separated from the other prisoners when they arrived at the Bago detention center and placed in solitary confinement, a person close to one of the families told RFA.

The four have been beaten and locked up in solitary confinement nearly every day since July 10, the youths’ family members and those familiar with the situation said.

“They were not handcuffed when they were first beaten, though their ankles were shackled,” the person told RFA.

Human rights violations in prisons, such as the beatings the students have experienced, have gotten worse since the military overthrew the democratically elected government in a February 2020 coup, said a spokesman for the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a Thai NGO.

“We have heard that political prisoners are being tortured intentionally and unjustly because they are political prisoners, and that they are being tortured in various ways,” he told RFA.

According to AAPP’s records, junta authorities have arrested 11,743 civilians for civil disobedience activities, of which 1,344 were sentenced to prison terms, since the coup took place.

When they were beaten while sitting without handcuffs, Banya Oo and Ye Htut Khaung tried to fight back, but were struck more forcefully, said the person close to one of the families of the detained students. They were then handcuffed, dragged away and locked in solitary cells.

“They were taken out of the cells every morning and were beaten again,” the person said, adding that the guards taunted them, asking if their revolution against the junta had succeeded and telling them to say “We must win,” while continuing the beatings.

The source said there were rumors that representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) may visit the detention center to investigate the alleged mistreatment of the students.

Prison guards removed the students from solitary confinement on July 18, though they are still suffering from injuries from the daily beatings and have not received medical treatment, he said.

Another RFA source, who did not want to be named for security reasons, said all four men had serious injuries, including broken noses and head wounds and that one was beaten until his teeth fell out.

RFA could not reach Prisons Department officials in Yangon or military junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment.

A statement issued by the ICRC in Myanmar on Monday said authorities must treat prisoners with dignity and humanity and ensure their health and safety. It also said the authorities had suspended ICRC access to prisons since March 2020 to check on detainees and provide humanitarian aid.

'These actions are crimes'

The torture of prisoners is a serious human rights violation because the students have already suffered from being sentenced to long jail terms, said the father of one of the students, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

“The kids have already been given punishments,” he said. “They haven’t broken any law or prison rules [since their arrests]. They didn’t even have any kind of prisoners’ rights and all these beatings are very serious violations of human rights.

“We feel that this kind of mistreatment has become more serious after the military coup,” he said. “There’s no rule of law at all. No matter what the law says, people would be arrested and unjustly sentenced by the courts once accusations were made against them.”

The students’ parents and relatives from Hpa-an requested permission to visit Tharrawaddy Prison, but prison authorities rejected their requests.

Tun Kyi, a senior member of the Former Political Prisoners Society, said prison authorities have a policy of torturing political prisoners.

“They are committing the most serious violation of human rights with the intention of subduing political prisoners so that they do not dare to rise up again,” he said. “They have laid out policies in various prisons, and then brutally oppressed and tortured the prisoners, often asking questions like, ‘Are you a revolutionary?’ and ‘Is your revolution making any headway?’ before hitting them.”

Hpa-an and Tharrawaddy prisons, along with Yangon’s Insein Prison, are among the worst detention centers of Myanmar’s more than 40 jails, Tun Kyi said.

A former prison warden, who did not want to be named out of concern for his safety, said the prison officials who mistreat detainees nowadays are former military officers.

A legal expert from Yangon, who did not want to be named for the same reason, said that physical beating of any detainee, including political prisoners, is a crime according to the regulations governing prisons.

“If you look at it as a lawyer, these actions are actually crimes because the jail manual states that prison wardens can give only 12 types of punishments,” he said. “No one else has the right to punish the prisoners. Among those 12 types of punishments that he can give, he is not allowed to beat prisoners.”

Those who torture political prisoners will be held to account at some point, said the AAPP spokesman, who declined to be named for safety reasons.

“Those who personally carry out the torture and all those who order it will have to pay restitution at some point,” he said. “This is a violation of both domestic and international law. Therefore, all those involved in the violations must surely pay restitution in the future.”

Translated by Khin Maung Nyane for RFA Burmese. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.