The window was very high, right below the ceiling. It was 100 cm x 50 cm and had bars on the outside and also shutters that didn’t really let fresh air or light through. It was not possible to open the window because it was nailed shut and too high anyway. There were no tables or chairs in the cell, so we sat, slept, and ate on our beds, which were covered with dirty mattresses. We bathed, cleaned the cell, and washed our clothes with only cold water. We were taken to the banya once every 20 days. The toilet was right in the cell and was a hole in the floor, there was no commode. This area was not screened off from the rest of the cell, so we had to go to the bathroom in front of our cellmates. We did partition it off by hanging up our own curtain. An unpleasant smell constantly came from this hole. The toilet was flushed using a tap in the wall, but it clogged every time we flushed. We also weren’t given anything to disinfect or clean the toilet. I suffered particularly from a little electric light in a cage that was always burning night and day. We couldn’t turn it off because the switch was on the opposite side of the door, in the passageway. Only the guards could turn it off, but they never did, so I could never understand if it was day or night outside.1 Ukraine, the applicants’ country of origin, did not recognize the applicants as its citizens. In response to requests from ADC Memorial and the consulate, the relevant authorities in Ukraine reported that vital statistics offices did have entries regarding the birth of the applicants in Beregovo, but that they did not apply for Ukrainian citizenship. Thus, it was impossible to expel Lakatosh, Forkosh, and Gabor. Over the course of a year, ADC Memorial staff and attorneys tried to achieve the release of these three people by filing complaints with courts and the prosecutor’s office challenging their confinement in a remand center for the purpose of expulsion due to the fact that they could not actually be expelled from Russia. Unable to achieve effective judicial protection in Russia, in 2010 ADC Memorial attorneys filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights regarding instances of inhuman and degrading treatment and the failure to take measures to expel the applicants from the Russian Federation attended by extended deprivation of liberty. The application also complained that the applicants lacked the right to check the legality of their detention and were not provided with effective judicial protection in regard to inhuman and degrading treatment or in regard to deprivation of liberty. The case of “Lakatosh and Others v. Russia” was heard by the ECtHR in 2011 as a priority case. The Russian government acknowledged that it had violated a number of articles of the European Convention, proposed a friendly settlement, and undertook to pay each applicant compensation in the amount of 30,000 euro, which the victims received in October 2011. 1  “Lakatosh and Others v. the Russian Federation: Millions in Compensation for Inhuman Treatment. Collection of Materials for a Roundtable,” Saint Petersburg: ADC Memorial, 2011, https://adcmemorial.org/wp-content/uploads/lakatosh_sajt.pdf [in Russian] 7