Aleksanyan suffers from life-threatening infections other than AIDS. They require urgent treatment but four months on this is still not happening

Armina Bagdasaryan, The New Times, 30.06.2008

For several months now they have not taken the bars off two windows in city hospital No 60. On the fifth floor of the haematology department two guards from the Federal Penitentiary Service still walk back and forth. There’s the same suspicion of new faces, the same attentive stare ... Since February they have guarded the ward in which Vasily Aleksanyan is being kept. Outsiders are forbidden to enter and only the patient’s lawyers and relatives can visit. Periodically his attorney Yelena Lvova goes to see her client. She and Aleksanyan discuss the present state of affairs but for the time being Lvova will not reveal any details. Earlier the European Court of Human Rights called four times on the Russian judicial system to transfer Vasily Aleksanyan to from prison to hospital. “Those ‘interim measures’ were purely preventive,” a source close to the court in Strasbourg tells The New Times. “They did not concern the substance of the case but were issued merely to ensure that he did not die before his case could be heard in court.”

Aleksanyan is waiting for his case to be examined in Strasbourg. As we have learned, it has been given priority at the European Court. Some predict that a decision may be taken in July, before the summer recess.

A patient’s rights

Information about the treatment the gravely ill man is receiving are contradictory. The hospital doctors have been forbidden to talk to journalists but in private and unofficial conversations they give assurances that everything is fine, the patient is getting all he needs and has no complaints.

“As far as I understand, the medical side of things is well in hand,” says Nikolai Svanidze, a member of the Public Chamber. “After we went to see him with Lukin we have heard no reproaches and no one has approached us with complaints on this score.” (In February Svanidze, together with the Russian Ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, visited Aleksanyan in hospital.)

However, one of New Times’ well-informed contacts says that the situation is not that simple. “Vasily Aleksanyan is not receiving the treatment he requires. I cannot disclose information that relates to medical confidentiality since Aleksanyan himself is very punctilious in such matters. I can say that he has complained to the European Court of Human Rights about how he is now being treated in hospital. His rights as a patient are not being respected. Aleksanyan is now suffering from other life-threatening infections that are the result of his Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). These are not being treated. He has consulted independent doctors who say the other infections must be rapidly tackled but they are not members of the consultative group that meets to assess his treatment. Meanwhile the doctors appointed by the State are dragging their feet and not taking any decisions. As a result, he has yet to receive the treatment for which he was transferred to a hospital back in February.”

The same source says that Aleksanyan, at present, remains under the supervision of court bailiffs though the term of his detention in custody has already expired.