A prisoner held in penitentiary No. 11 in Balti filed a complaint against Moldova at the European Court of Human Rights over inhuman and degrading detention conditions. His lawyer Roman Zadoinov told a news conference on January 24 that the man is held in a dirty cell together with another 17 prisoners, where there is no water and ventilation, Info-Prim Neo reports. According to the lawyer, the man is accused of stealing money from a person from Odessa in 1997. In 2004, he left for Belgium, while in 2007 he was announced wanted. He was arrested in 2008. “He has been held in the penitentiary without a trial for two years. The detention conditions are appalling. Seventeen persons are held in a cell intended for 12 persons. These 17 persons have no room for movement. There is only one toilet that is not separated from the rest of the room. There is no sewerage system. The detainees sleep in turn as not all of them have beds. In the morning, they receive only a can of water and a slice of bread,” said Roman Zadoinov. The man's wife and their child had to remain in Belgium. His mother returned from Greece, where she was working, in order to be closer to her son. The woman said that when she takes her son's clothes home to wash them, they are covered in blood and stink. There are a lot of insects in the cell that bite him all over the body. The woman also said that all her complaints to the penitentiary's administration remained unanswered. “I appealed to the Chisinau Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court of Justice and the Balti Court of Appeals, but received no answer. They all avoid examining the case,” said Roman Zadoinov, specifying that the application to the ECHR was submitted in July 2010. The same day, the Department of Penitentiary Institutions issued a statement, denying the accusations made by lawyer Roman Zadoinov and describing them as groundless. “If the situation had been so deplorable as lawyer Zadoinov asserts, our penitentiaries would have been centers of contagion and we would have had riots in prisons every week,” reads the statement. The Department also says that this year the food in penitentiaries has been improved, the prisoners have been supplied with soap, toothpaste and other hygienic products and there have been carried out repair works designed to improve detention conditions.