HL Deb 11 May 1981 vol 420 cc435-6WA
Lord Hylton

asked Her Majesty's Government:

What information they possess concerning the case of Mr. Viktor Ryzhov-Davydov, a Russian said to be undergoing unnecessary drug treatment for an invented psychiatric condition in the Blagoveshchensk prison-hospital near the Pacific coast of Siberia.

Lord Carrington

Mr. Ryzhov-Davydov was arrested in November 1979 and charged with libelling the Soviet system. A Soviet psychiatrist found him to be responsible for his actions. He was, however, further examined at the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow and was sentenced in September 1980 to compulsory drug treatment in a special psychiatric hospital in Kazan. He was moved to Blagoveshschensk in November 1980.

Her Majesty's Government find particularly repugnant the abuse of medicine and psychiatry for political purposes in the Soviet Union as well as the persecution of those who have attempted to investigate and expose the misuse of psychiatry.