The Lefortovo pretrial detention centre in Moscow. Photo: Maxim Shipenkov / EPA-EFE

A bill to bring Russian pretrial detention centres under the control of the Federal Security Service (FSB), was introduced to the State Duma on Wednesday, according to one of the bill’s authors, United Russia Deputy Vasily Piskaryov.

If approved, the bill would empower the FSB to establish its own pretrial detention facilities as well as grant the agency additional powers to detain and transport prisoners facing charges including treason, espionage, terrorism and extremism, Piskaryov wrote.

In 2005, Vladimir Putin ordered control of all FSB pretrial detention facilities to pass to the newly created Federal Penitentiary Service, an agency within the Justice Ministry, to meet the standards of the Council of Europe, of which Russia was a member from 1996 until 2022, when it withdrew from the organisation after launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Piskaryov, who said that the decision, which had been made “at the suggestion of Western ‘partners’ to comply with ‘European values’”, had failed to make Russia more secure and stressed that “additional measures” were needed to thwart the attempts made in recent years by “foreign intelligence agencies and terrorist organisations to communicate with spies and terrorists under investigation”.

However, despite formally being under the jurisdiction of the FSIN, seven pretrial facilities, including the notorious Lefortovo prison in Moscow, which holds defendants accused of treason and espionage, remain under de facto FSB control, with its officers having direct access to prisoners, lawyer Yevgeny Smirnov told Novaya Gazeta Europe.

If passed, the new bill would only serve to legalise an existing practice, according to Smirnov, who added that by giving the FSB the power to restrict the access of lawyers to their clients, it was likely to worsen the conditions of detainees, many of whom face politically motivated charges.

Ivan Pavlov, founder of human rights NGO First Department, said that if passed, the bill would mean the practices seen at Lefortovo could be applied to any new prisons the FSB decided to set up elsewhere in the country without outside control.

Smirnov warned that if the FSB gained formal access to the prison system, the Prosecutor’s Office and the courts would remain “the only nominally independent bodies” in the Russian criminal justice system.