Translated by Maria Bascom

Police Department No. 3 in the Staropromyslovsky District of Grozny refused to open a criminal case on behalf of Aminat Lorsanova concerning assault and forced medical treatment. Lorsanova’s report was registered in March but the review carried out by the Chechen Interior Ministry’s office had already ended in February, according to the document.

On January 20th, Aminat Lorsanova, who was beaten and tortured at the Boev Clinic for borderline conditions in Grozny, appealed to the Investigative Committee. In her statement, she indicated that she was beaten and tortured because of her sexual orientation and rejection of Islam and asked to open a criminal investigation against her parents, the clinic’s doctors, and the man who “tried to exorcise a genie from her”.

We found that the Investigative Committee of Russia referred the case to Chechnya, and the Chechen police refused to initiate any criminal proceedings. The report itself was registered on March 17, 2020, and the review carried out by the local Interior Ministry employees, according to the document, ended on February 21, 2020. That is, the employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs completed a review of the report almost a month before the report was submitted.

Let us recall that Lorsanova turned to the Russian LGBT Network for help due to the fact that she was a victim of conversion therapy via abuse from her father and compulsory psychiatric treatment. In July 2020, Viktor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on Protection against Discrimination and Violence Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI), published a report on conversion therapy, in which he called for equating conversion therapy to torture. The Russian Federation does not recognize the mandate of the UN Independent Expert on SOGI.

As noted by Veronika Lapina, a worker from the Russian LGBT Network, the staff of the Boev ​​clinic diagnosed Aminat Lorsanova with Bleuler's disease. 

“Bleuler's disease was renamed schizophrenia in the 1930s, and the former term is now nonexistent in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10). On this basis, I turned to the Ministry of Health with a request to review the Boev Clinic for borderline conditions for compliance with the procedures for the provision of medical care, compliance with the standards of medical care, compliance with the procedures for giving informed voluntary consent to medical intervention and refusal of medical intervention, and compliance with the procedures for conducting a medical psychiatric examination. In response to my appeal, the Federal Service for Supervision in the Sphere of Healthcare addressed the Prosecutor's Office of the Chechen Republic with a request to conduct an inquiry into the report."