Belarusian Medical-Labor Centers “Cure” Alcoholism With Hunger

The Mahiliou MLC patients do not have enough food.

There are complaints, that “patients” do not get enough food in the Mahiliou Medical-Labor Centre №7.

There is no work for most of the MLC prisoners, so they’ve got no money to stock up on vital provisions. The canteen can’t meet the needs of the “patients,” Radio Svaboda informs.

A prisoner, who asked not to be named, appealed to the Mahiliou human rights center and told about the conditions of detention. The man insists that he has been placed in the MLC illegally and he asks to defend his rights.

According to him, there is a similar situation in the other MLCs of Belarus. A lot of the “patients” of such institutions, he says, have been put there against their will, and they cannot defend themselves.

Human rights activists failed to check the information, voiced by the Mahiliou MLC patient, with the administration. Activists say they will seek admission to the territory of the “dispensary” to see with their own eyes the incarceration conditions there.

The Mahiliou Medical-Labour Centre №7 was organized after the liquidation of the penal colony № 19 in order to optimize the penitentiary system. The MLC is designed for 600 beds. It is known that each year the court imposes such “rehabilitation” on nearly a thousand men and women in Mahiliou region. The Medical-Labor Centers persons are meant for patients with substance abuse, alcoholism and drug addiction. The people are cured of these dependences during a year.

The cases, when MLC patients try to appeal their sending there, are not uncommon. In 2011, for example, more than 100 Mahiliou residents sent such appeals to court. We failed to figure out, how many of them had been satisfied.

A medical-labor center is an organization for compulsory isolation and medical and social rehabilitation with the obligation to work for citizens suffering from alcoholism, drug addiction and substance abuse. The people, who are obliged to reimburse the state for the maintenance of their children in public care or violate labor discipline as a result of alcohol, drugs, psychotropic and toxic substances, can be sent to such an organization.

The MLC “patients” are to be provided with three meals a day.

According to human rights defenders, MLCs are not much different from prisons and detention conditions in such places are sometimes regarded as inhuman. Many of those, who have been to medical-labor centers, claim that there is no treatment there, and the forced labor is very badly paid.