MOSCOW (Reuters) - Jailed Russian mothers are to be freed regardless
of their crimes under a proposed amnesty approved by President Vladimir
Putin Thursday, the Kremlin press service said.
The proposal put forward by the former head of the government's disbanded
pardons commission, Anatoly Pristavkin, would free thousands of women by
extending an amnesty approved in November by the State Duma lower house
of parliament.
That pardon freed roughly 23,000 women and children under 16, but
included only women who were pregnant, disabled, over 50 or single mothers.
The new measure would extend to women who had committed serious crimes
-- left out of the November amnesty -- with each case being examined
individually.
Russia has one of the world's biggest prison populations, with roughly
a million inmates, and regularly uses amnesties to control numbers
in its bulging prisons.
"In theory, this is a humane act, but it is an artificial way of
lowering the population of our prisons," said Viktoria Sergeyeva of
Penal Reform International,
a nongovernmental organization lobbying for human rights and prison reform.
"It is not a way of regulating the prison population."
Human rights campaigners have repeatedly condemned the squalid, disease-ridden
conditions in which most prisoners live.
According to Justice Ministry figures published last November and quoted
by Interfax news agency, 493 children under the age of three live in Russian
prisons.