Phone Call to Putin

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Phone Call to Putin (Russian: звонок Путину) is a popular torture method used by Russian police to coerce confessions out of detainees. It consists of administering electric shocks to the person's earlobes. [1]

This method was profiled in a 9 August 2004 article in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta titled "Phone Call to Putin: This is the name of a new method that the cops love. In the war against your own people, all tactics are good." The article described a case in Nizhniy Novgorod where a man was falsely accused of murder and rape. After surviving the "phone call", he escaped from the police and jumped out of a third-floor window. He broke his collarbone and appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. [2]