If you don't want to, we will force you! Who and how was force-fed in custody

As you know, Alexey Navalny went on a hunger strike. One way the prison authorities use force-feeding in such cases to force a prisoner to abandon this step is through force-feeding.

The UN Human Rights Organization considers this practice to be a form of torture and a violation of international law. In addition, it was banned back in 1975 as part of the WHO Tokyo Declaration. But the World Medical Association believes that a person who has gone on a hunger strike can be force-fed if he can no longer make decisions on his own and did not leave any instructions on this matter. It is curious that the ECHR does not consider force-feeding a prohibited practice, although it states that this procedure should be as humane as possible so as not to become torture.

Russian laws allow forcibly feeding prisoners if there is a written doctor's opinion on this matter. In the monograph of the head of the Academy of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Alexander Krymov, "Forced feeding of convicts to imprisonment", which was published in 2018, it is said that there are no clear rules for this process, but the norms of the nutrient mixture are taken from the Soviet order of 1958.

This practice was widely used in the USSR. For example, Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko began to be force-fed a month after the start of his last hunger strike. He himself described this process as follows:

“The nutritional mixture is prepared deliberately with large lumpy pieces of food that do not pass through the hose, but get stuck in it and, clogging it, do not pass the nutritional mixture into the stomach. Under the guise of cleaning the hose, they torture me, massaging and pulling the hose without removing it from my stomach..."

Another Soviet dissident, the great physicist and public figure Andrei Sakharov, was also force-fed:

“They threw me on the bed, tied my arms and legs. A tight clip was put on the nose, so that I could only breathe through my mouth. When I opened my mouth to breathe in air, a spoonful of nutrient mixture from broth with mashed meat was poured into my mouth. Sometimes the mouth was opened forcibly - with a lever inserted between the gums".

In Russia, force-feeding was used by employees of the Matrosskaya Tishina SIZO in Moscow against the ex-head of the Serpukhov District of the Moscow Region, Alexander Shestun, who was on a hunger strike. This was announced by the prisoner himself in his letter.

According to the press secretary of the former official Vlada Rusina, the ex-head of the Serpukhov region "was fed through a tube and made droppers".

But the politician Sergey Udaltsov , who in 2014 went on a hunger strike for 25 days, protesting against the sentence (4.5 years in prison for the riots on Bolotnaya Square), under the threat of force-feeding, ended his hunger strike.

In December 2014, in a Moscow pre-trial detention center, Ukrainian pilot Nadezhda Savchenko went on a hunger strike because a doctor was not allowed to see her. Prison authorities had been injecting glucose for nearly two months to maintain health, and in March she ended her protest due to a deterioration in well-being.

Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov was also on hunger strike, demanding the release of all Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia, he did not eat for 145 days, and ended the hunger strike in October 2018 under the threat of force-feeding.