At least 149 people have been subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in Crimea since the beginning of Russia's annexation of the peninsula, the CrimeaSOS public organization has said in a report.

According to the report presented in Kyiv on Monday, December 4, the first cases were recorded in the first days of the Russian military operation in Crimea, when the so-called "self-defense" of Crimea abducted and used torture against journalists and pro-Ukrainian activists.

Later, according to the authors of the report, such actions have already been carried out by FSB officers and representatives of correctional institutions, and were systemic.

"At the time of writing the report, no independent investigation was carried out into a single case of torture or inhuman treatment, and the perpetrators were not brought to justice. In fact, there is a practice of impunity in Crimea with regard to torture," the authors of the report state.

The document also recorded cases when torture caused death (Reshat Ametov, Valeriy Kerimov, ten deaths in a pretrial detention center in Simferopol in 2017).

The study includes information on human rights violations in the occupied Crimea since the beginning of its annexation by Russia, from February 26, 2014 to October 31, 2017.

The report was prepared by CrimeaSOS as part of a project supported by the Representative Office of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (Foundation) in Ukraine.