April 2004 Archives

Gazeta.ru

Amnesty International recognized Igor Sutyagin, sentenced to 15 years for espionage in Russia, as a political prisoner Monday. Sergei Nikitin, the organization’s Russian director, told MosNews he believes Sutyagin was prosecuted unfairly.

“We believe that the trial showed numerous violations in legal proceedings,” he said. “We urge a retrial and call for Sutyagin to be released until the next hearing.”

Sutyagin, who worked for the USA and Canada Institute, was arrested by FSB agents in Kaluga in October 1999. He was charged with selling information on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British company that the prosecutor said was a cover for the CIA.

The Moscow City Court found Sutyagin guilty of state treason April 7 and sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Nikitin said that the organization plans to address PACE together with Human Rights Watch, the Moscow Helsinki Group, and the Russian Committee for Scientists’ Rights on the behalf of Sutyagin, asking PACE to “establish justice”.

The organizations, according to Nikitin, jointly believe that Sutyagin’s trial was one of the first signs heralding the start of political repression in Russia. The address will be publicized on Tuesday evening.

The statement has already been signed by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Vitaly Ginzburg, journalist Grigory Pasko (who has also been tried for treason), and other prominent Russian public figures and activists.

The scientist’s lawyer, Boris Kuznetsov, told MosNews that the decision to address PACE was a move to get the attention of western investors. “What investors are concerned about is crime. This is fine if the court system is working properly,” Kuznetsov told MosNews, “but this will be a signal [to investors] that the court system here is not working properly.”

However, Kuznetsov said he doubts that a petition from Amnesty International will help get his client out of prison anytime soon. The scientist will remain in a Moscow detention center pending appeals, and how soon he is released depends only on the success of those appeals, he said.

“First, the ruling must be appealed to the Supreme Court,” he said, “but we need to prove that the trial was conducted with procedural violations.” Kuznetsov was optimistic, however, saying that the defense already had enough evidence of procedural violations.

He admitted that Amnesty International’s recognition of Sutyagin as a political prisoner would add weight to his case before the Supreme Court. As MosNews reported earlier, the defense team appealed to the Supreme Court on April 14.

Lawyers representing Sutyagin have already got in touch with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg about hearing his case there. “As far as I know, Strasbourg is willing to hear the case,” Kuznetsov told MosNews. “If the PACE address is unsuccessful, we will take it to Strasbourg.”

He said he hopes Amnesty International’s statement will draw the attention of prominent Russian human rights activists, and that the publicity will bolster the case in the Russian Supreme Court.

Boston Globe, April 21, 2004

By Anna Dolgov, Globe Correspondent

OBNINSK, Russia -- The walls of the apartment are covered with
children's paintings -- still-life studies in blue and yellow that the
two girls made after security service agents seized other pictures as
evidence in an espionage case against their father.

Igor Sutyagin, an arms control researcher from a respected think tank,
lived in the apartment until he was jailed in 1999. Despite insistence
by rights groups that the charges were trumped up and that the
prosecution had failed to present any serious evidence, a jury court
convicted Sutyagin of espionage and treason April 6.

He was sentenced to 15 years in jail earlier this month, with the 4
years he spent in pretrial detention counted toward the term.

''The girls will be 23 and 24 when he serves out his sentence," said the
researcher's father, Vyacheslav, sitting on a couch under his
granddaughters' paintings in Sutyagin's home in this town southwest of
Moscow.

Russia introduced jury trials in the 1990s after decades of having guilt
or innocence decided by a presiding judge and two deputies, who
routinely rubber-stamped guilty verdicts. Sutyagin's case and others
have been marred by allegations of jury manipulation and pressure to
achieve verdicts sought by President Vladimir V. Putin's Kremlin,
reviving a semblance of Soviet
show trials.

''These kinds of machinations with juries to achieve the needed result .
. . are another demonstration of Putin's absolute disregard for
democracy," said Alexei Melnikov, a former legislator whose liberal
faction pushed for setting up jury trials before it lost Parliament
seats in a sweeping victory by a pro-Kremlin party last December.

In cases with no political issues at stake, the acquittal rate in jury
trials has been much higher, and in the first politically sensitive
hearing, physicist Valentin Danilov was acquitted of spying last
December. The charges were initiated by the Federal Security Service, or
FSB, the domestic successor to the Soviet KGB, and rights advocates say
that after the December ruling, the agency made sure it would not lose
again.

''The FSB couldn't tolerate that. They used all their resources to
ensure guilty verdicts," said Ernst Chyorny, a leader of the group
Ecology and Human Rights who closely followed the cases.

On the same day Sutyagin was convicted, a panel of jurors delivered a
guilty verdict in another case that raised alarms from rights groups.

Zarema Muzhikhoyeva, from Ingushetia, a region adjoining war-ravaged
Chechnya, was found guilty of terrorism. But Muzhikhoyeva, 23, says she
had been forced into a suicide-bombing attempt last July by separatist
rebels. She did not set off the homemade bomb when arrested on a street
that runs outward from the Kremlin, and she cooperated with
investigators.

Her testimony led investigators to a safe-house for bombers and a cache
of explosives and helped create a composite of a suspected organizer of
several deadly attacks. But an explosives specialist from the FSB was
killed while trying to defuse her bomb.

Critics noted the extenuating circumstances in her case in arguing for
leniency in sentencing. But the jury recommended no leniency, and she
received a 20-year prison term.

Muzhikhoyeva screamed when the verdict in the closed-door trial was read
aloud, according to her lawyer, Natalya Yevlapova.

''Don't you understand that I never blew up anything?" Muzhikhoyeva
cried out at the jurors, according to the lawyer.

Sutyagin was accused of spying for the United States by providing
classified data to a British firm that investigators say was a cover for
the CIA. The researcher or his Russian employer, the Institute for USA
and Canada Studies, had no access to classified information, and
Sutyagin says he openly freelanced for the British firm, Alternative
Futures, analyzing public materials.

After initial hearings last year, his trial was postponed, the judge was
replaced, and -- without explanation and against the law, defense
attorneys allege -- new jurors were selected.

''I have major suspicions about the makeup of this jury," Chyorny said.
''All 12 jurors wouldn't have voted the same way in the absence of
strong proof, unless they were specially handpicked to do that."

Defense attorneys said the prosecution failed to present evidence at the
closed-door trial to support its contention that Sutyagin used anything
beyond public materials in his work. The researcher's lawyer, Vladimir
Vasiltsov also said that the sides had a pool of only 35 potential
jurors to choose from and that the preliminary stage that produced those
35 candidates remained an ''absolute mystery" for the defense team,
stoking worries that people linked to the FSB had been planted inside
the group.

The new judge, Marina Komarova, has a history of handing down guilty
verdicts in FSB cases, and Sutyagin's attorneys said she barred the
testimony of crucial defense witnesses and dictated a guilty verdict by
her final questions to the jurors.

''This was classic manipulation," Vasiltsov said. ''Judge Komarova did
everything she could to ensure a guilty verdict.

''She asked jurors to consider if meetings in Birmingham and London took
place, if conversations took place, if there was a transfer of data --
and Igor never denied most of this -- but there was no mention of
whether the data came from open sources or of whether it constituted
state secrets.

''The way the questions were phrased, if I were placed within strict
boundaries and had to answer just 'yes' or 'no,' I tend to think I would
have been forced to answer like the jurors did," he said.

In Sutyagin's home, shelves are still stacked with newspapers and
magazines he used in his work, with passages underlined in red. Obninsk
was a ''closed city" under the Soviet Union that opened up in the late
1980s, and Sutyagin thought he was free to work for foreigners.

But he wasn't. FSB agents scooped up everything when they searched the
apartment -- his notes, computer, his daughters' paintings. They later
returned most things, except the computer.

Even after Sutyagin's sentencing, the telephone in his home is tapped,
and letters arrive opened or clumsily glued back shut, relatives say.

''Maybe the jurors were specially selected, or maybe they were just
never given a chance to understand this case," said Sutyagin's father,
Vyacheslav.

Sutyagin's wife, Irina Manannikova, said: ''The FSB can be proud now --
finally the jurors have closed this chapter. A jury trial is a major
trump card the FSB can flash."

Washington Post, April 21, 2004

By Masha Lipman
Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Pro et Contra Journal, writes a monthly column for The Post.

MOSCOW -- The conviction and prison sentence of Igor Sutyagin this month
offers more evidence of how Russia's judicial system is falling under
the control of the executive branch. Sutyagin, an arms control
researcher, was sentenced to 15 years on trumped-up charges of
espionage. His case raises many of the same concerns as that of Mikhail
Khodorkovsky, the jailed oil
tycoon. Defense lawyers in these cases increasingly find themselves
under strong pressure from the prosecution and state security agencies.
Both cases mock President Vladimir Putin's stated commitment to the rule
of law, and they devalue the progress of judicial reform.

One of the major defects of the Soviet judiciary was the dependency of
its judges on the Communist Party. Only the Communist bosses were seen
to possess the ultimate truth about guilt and innocence. Thus, those who
were prosecuted and tried were almost inevitably found guilty.

In the post-Communist years judicial reform has had its ups and down,
but progress toward true rule of law has been undeniable. The criminal
and the procedural codes have become more humane, and independent
lawyers have become an important factor of Russian life; they have
repeatedly demonstrated that they can make a difference. The jury trials
eliminated by the Bolsheviks have been reintroduced, providing hope for
better justice. Though independent judges, immune to corruption, are
still a goal rather than a reality, the state appeared to have lost its
unquestioned authority over the judicial branch.

This was well illustrated by several cases -- those of environmentalists
Grigory Pasko and Alexander Nikitin, diplomat Valentin Moiseev,
physicist Valentin Danilov and a few others -- prosecuted by the state
security service (the FSB) for espionage. Reviving the old Soviet
mentality -- all foreign contacts are suspicious, and suspect
individuals must be repressed
-- the FSB brought charges in these cases with the cooperation of
sympathetic state prosecutors. But as each case reached the courtroom,
the defense demonstrated that the charges were flimsy and far-fetched,
and the prosecution was defeated. Even if the judges didn't acquit the
defendants for fear of antagonizing the FSB, they showed a certain
degree of independence by coming up with compromise rulings -- generally
soft sentences that allowed defendants to walk out of the courtroom
after the verdict.

Putin has turned the security and law enforcement bodies into pillars of
his government. The Kremlin, in its struggle against political enemies,
has been resorting to the services of the prosecutor's office and the
FSB. The prosecution of Khodorkovsky, the Kremlin's No. 1 enemy, has
been a succession of blatant procedural violations. It is apparently
understood by both the prosecution and the judge that the president
wants Khodorkovsky locked up (he has been in custody since October), and
they have acted accordingly, with little regard for the case his lawyers
present. Two other people associated with Khodorkovsky and his business
have spent even more time in jail. Defense lawyers in these cases have
been searched, harassed and threatened with prosecution.

The charges against Sutyagin were based on analytical papers on defense
issues that he wrote for a British company, an act he never denied. The
defense had solid evidence that every piece of information contained in
Sutyagin's papers had been published and was available to anyone who
wanted to read it. Moreover, Sutyagin never had access to state secrets.
The charges against Sutyagin appeared as hollow as those against his
predecessor "spy" suspects, and it seemed likely that he, too, would
walk out of the courtroom, especially because a jury was hearing his
case.

It turned out, however, that even the jury trial can be turned into a
mock institution when superior political will and "accusatory bias"
substitute for justice. The judge worded questions to the jurors in a
way that pushed them to give "appropriate" answers. For instance, she
omitted the word "secret" in asking the jurors whether Sutyagin handed
over materials for money. Defense lawyers lodged objections, but the
judge dismissed them. Talking to me 10 days after the sentence, Boris
Kuznetsov, a lawyer for Sutyagin, called the actions of the judge
"misleading and manipulating" toward the jurors. "We did not lose this
case," Kuznetsov added, "because this was not an adversary proceeding.
This was not a duel; it was a stab in the back."

Sutyagin's lawyers have appealed to the Supreme Court, complaining about
the judge's actions. For the time being, however, the "accusatory bias"
of Sutyagin's judge has done more than ruin the life of a talented
scholar and his family. It has discredited the Russian judicial system
and put in doubt the newly introduced institution of jury trials. The
Supreme Court decision will come as a critical test: Can the judiciary,
at least at its topmost level, act independently or will the state
security apparatus further consolidate its hold?

Source

Russian human rights organizations will ask the Amnesty International to declare Igor Sutyagin prisoner of conscience. The letter already has more than thirty signatures. If you would like to add your name to the request, please, send a letter to info@hro.org before 8:00pm April 21st, 2004.

The Moscow Helsinki Group, the Committee to Defend Scientists, and the defense of Igor Sutyagin will hold a round table discussion about the Sutyagin case on April 26th, 2004.

The Moscow Times, Friday, Apr. 16, 2004. Page 6

By Alexander Petrov

Igor Sutyagin was sentenced last week to 15 years in prison, the longest sentence for espionage since Soviet times. The Moscow City Court handed down a guilty verdict to the 39-year-old nuclear scientist, who has been in prison since 1999 on high treason charges leveled by the FSB.

More broadly, Sutyagin's case reflects two worrying trends in Russia today: the chilling effect that the FSB is having on freedom of information and the overall degradation of basic freedoms. His trial followed a 4 1/2-year investigation that was deeply flawed by due process violations. And the trial, which was closed to the public, raises further concerns about due process.

The court found that Sutyagin had passed on information regarding Russian nuclear armaments to a foreign firm in exchange for a fee, a fact that Sutyagin himself has never denied. But this doesn't amount to espionage, which under Russian law either requires evidence that an individual passed information to a foreign intelligence agent or evidence that information passed to another party was secret, and that the accused intended to cause harm to state security.

Allegations that Alternative Futures, the British-based consultancy that employed Sutyagin on a legal freelance contract, was linked to a foreign intelligence service were based on testimonies of experts from the FSB Research Institute. According to the lawyers the experts were not able to say unambiguously that the company was linked to intelligence. Because there is no proven link to foreign intelligence, the law obliges the judge to ask the jury whether the information passed on to this firm constitutes a state secret. According to Sutyagin's lawyers, the judge failed to do this.

For years, Sutyagin and his attorneys repeatedly insisted that all of the information he passed on to Alternative Futures had been obtained from the public domain. Throughout the investigation, the FSB refused to verify Sutyagin's claim in this regard. Inconsistent and confusing testimonies by experts from the FSB and Defense Ministry, which are not impartial state agencies, left in doubt whether Sutyagin had disclosed real secrets and caused damage to the state. According to the previous decision of the Kaluga regional court, one expert stated that the material disclosed state secrets and another said that it did not. A third expert stated, to the confusion of many, that the material was "partially inaccurate, however it contained state secrets."

According to Sutyagin's attorneys, the court failed to examine any evidence of his intent to harm the state, as the law demands. The only thing we can be sure of is that he intended to earn some money to support his family.

The trial itself was highly controversial from the start. After the first hearing in December, the composition of the jury was entirely and inexplicably changed. The presiding judge, a leading expert on jury trials, was also replaced without explanation by another judge who had no previous experience in directing a jury. In her closing speech, the judge dwelled extensively on Alternative Futures, although allegations that the company was tied to a foreign intelligence service were based on assumptions rather than on proven facts. Sutyagin's lawyers believe that, in doing so, the judge may have inappropriately influenced the jury.

These are only the latest examples of a series of due process violations that marked Sutyagin's case throughout its four-year history. In 2001, after Sutyagin had been in jail for two years, Kaluga regional court observed that the charges against him and the indictment were so vaguely formulated that they "interfered with Sutyagin's right to a defense."

Sutyagin's protracted legal battle with Russia's security services is not unique. Throughout the past eight years, the FSB has pressed dubious espionage charges against about a dozen scientists, journalists and environmentalists. Each of the defendants had worked with foreign contacts on issues that, in Soviet times, were under the exclusive control of the KGB -- nuclear waste dumping, environmental degradation, Russia's military preparedness, military technology and so on -- but which became topics of broader public debate in the post-Soviet era. In pursuing these cases, the FSB appears to be seeking to restore what it sees as its exclusive dominion over these issues, and to impose new limitations on freedom of expression on such topics.

Reassertion of control has become a common theme in Russian politics today. The Kremlin handily reasserted its control over national television, and there is little doubt that it is reasserting its command over the political process. Several years ago, President Vladimir Putin established a system of regional "super-governors" that assured the Kremlin's control over the regions. The Putin administration was delivered an utterly acquiescent parliament in December's Duma elections. The Yukos-Khodorkovsky saga can also be seen within this context.

The conduct of the Sutyagin case demonstrates the Russian government's transparent emphasis on form over content in matters that affect human rights. The government will no doubt argue that Sutyagin was tried by a jury, though it appears that this was merely an imitation of a fair trial. The government also boasts that Russia is a democracy, yet recent parliamentary and presidential elections bore little resemblance to democratic votes. Last year, the government claimed that a local referendum and presidential election in Chechnya showed that the war-torn republic was on its way toward "normalization," though the votes were deeply flawed and violence continues to rage there. Putin frequently stresses his commitment to a free press, but after his first term in office, all independent television stations have been muzzled.

It reminds me of an old joke we used to tell each other in the Soviet days: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." Russian society needs to resist accepting form over content, otherwise we may soon find ourselves watching imitation news on state-run television, voting in imitation elections and imitating joy and happiness by marching in rows in mass demonstrations -- approved by the government, just like in the "good old days."

Alexander Petrov, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Moscow office, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

Source

By ROBERT AMSTERDAM

UPDATED AT 6:22 PM EDT Thursday, Apr. 15, 2004

Toronto -- Re The Sutyagin Case Doesn't Indict All Russian Justice (April 14): I was startled to read Peter Solomon's conclusion that the Igor Sutyagin case is atypical of Russian justice. As a lawyer acting on behalf of three political prisoners in Russian jails -- Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev and Aleksei Pichugen -- I beg to disagree.

I have witnessed Russian "telephone justice" first-hand, watching political instructions given via cellphones to prosecutors in front of judges. The judges' obvious bias is recognized by all counsel who practise before them.

When I identified this "Basmanny justice" (named after a particularly notorious courthouse in Russia) where the rule of law is absent, a major Moscow newspaper interviewed Russian lawyers concerning my comments. The Russian lawyers unanimously agreed and admitted they had not raised the issue because they had to practise there each day.

Mr. Solomon fails to note that a lengthy jail term in Russia is a death sentence, given the rampant HIV and tuberculosis in Russian jails.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg sits with more than 50,000 complaints concerning Russia. The sorry state of Russian justice requires countries like Canada to make the rule of law an issue, particularly as Russia attempts to join the World Trade Organization.

Mr. Sutyagin represents the rule for Russian justice -- not the exception.

Source

Lawyers for arms control researcher Igor Sutyagin filed an appeal to the Supreme Court protesting his conviction for treason, the English-language daily The Moscow Times reported.

2004-04-15 12:05

A City Court judge sentenced Sutyagin to 15 years in prison last Wednesday after he was found guilty of state treason in the form of espionage.

Lawyer Anna Stavitskaya said the defense is protesting the replacement for no good reason of the judge and jury after the trial had begun and claiming that Judge Marina Komarova had misdirected jurors to ignore the non-classified nature of the information Sutyagin had passed on, the paper reported.

Source

By Michele A. Berdy

×èñòîñåðäå÷íîå ïðèçíàíèå: a confession "straight from the heart."

Ah, spring. The snow is melting, Easter eggs are on the table, we all forgave one another on Forgiveness Sunday (Ïðîù¸ííîå âîñêðåñåíüå) -- well, almost everyone. Some people seem to be unforgiven and unforgivable, even those showing some degree of repentance.

Part of the problem might be deciding what, exactly, they are guilty of: Êîëëåãèÿ èç 12 ïðèñÿæíûõ åäèíîãëàñíî ïðèçíàëà ðîññèéñêîãî ó÷¸íîãî Èãîðÿ Ñóòÿãèíà âèíîâíûì â ãîñóäàðñòâåííîé èçìåíå (a 12-person jury unanimously convicted Russian scholar Igor Sutyagin of treason). Another news service wrote: Ñóòÿãèí åäèíîãëàñíî ïðèçíàí àìåðèêàíñêèì øïèîíîì (Sutyagin was unanimously convicted of being an American spy). And a third had a different take: Ñóä íàêàçàë Ñóòÿãèíà çà óïðÿìñòâî (the court punished Sutyagin for stubbornness). Boy -- 15 years hard labor for stubbornness?! Am I in trouble, or what?

His lawyer has two other versions: Ñóä ðàñïðàâèëñÿ ñ ìîèì ïîäçàùèòíûì çà òî, ÷òî òîò îòêàçàëñÿ ïðèçíàòü ñâîþ âèíó â îáìåí íà ñìÿã÷åíèå ïðèãîâîðà (the court got even with my defendant for refusing to admit his guilt in return for a reduced sentence). Ê ñîæàëåíèþ, â ñòðàíå ñíîâà ÿâëÿåòñÿ ïðåñòóïëåíèåì íå ñàíêöèîíèðîâàííîå ãîñóäàðñòâîì îáùåíèå ñ èíîñòðàíöàìè (unfortunately, it is once again a crime in our country to have contact with foreigners that is not sanctioned by the state). Did I say trouble? Make that big trouble.

If you believe his lawyer, Sutyagin got a long sentence for failing to confess his crimes (ïðåñòóïëåíèÿ) or rather his sins (ãðåõè) -- I'm not sure what category we are talking about here. In Russian cop-talk, a voluntary, full confession is ÷èñòîñåðäå÷íîå ïðèçíàíèå -- a confession straight from the heart. No wonder it's easy to confuse sins and crimes in Russia, the boundary is rather blurred. In any case, Sutyagin maintains: "ß íå âèíîâåí" (I'm not guilty).

Now, if you have committed a sin or misdeed of a non-legal nature, you'd say: ß âèíîâàò (I'm guilty; it's my fault; I did it). Both adjectives come from âèíèòü (to accuse). While Sutyagin was awaiting trial, he was îáâèíÿåìûé (the accused). Once the jury came in with a guilty verdict, he became îñóæä¸ííûé (convicted).

The other famous îáâèíÿåìûé, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has been repenting his sins left, right and center -- or so some people maintain. Here it's a little foggy as well. In any case, to follow the discussion you need to know that ïîêàÿíèå is "a confession," "repentance," with deeply religious overtones and the sense of "public penitence." The verb is ïîêàÿòüñÿ; ðàñêàÿòüñÿ also means "to repent," but usually at a slightly lower level of breast-beating and without making amends in public.

One author writes: Íå ïîêàÿíèå ëè ýòî? Íå ñäà÷à ëè ýòî ïîçèöèé? (Is this not repentance? Is he not backing down?) He continues:  êàêîì-òî ñìûñëå ýòî ìîæíî íàçâàòü ïîêàÿíèåì, íî äàâàéòå ñêàæåì: ýòî íå ïðåñìûêàòåëüñòâî ïåðåä âëàñòüþ. Ýòî ïîêàÿíèå ïåðåä ñòðàíîé. (To some extent you can call it repentance. But in any case, it's not groveling before the authorities. It's repentance before the nation.) Ïðåñìûêàòüñÿ (to grovel) is a nasty-sounding word in Russian. You need only know that ïðåñìûêàþùååñÿ is a reptile.

Other writers had no doubts: Õîäîðêîâñêèé ïðèçíàë âèíó (Khodorkovsky admitted his guilt). Õîäîðêîâñêèé ðàñêàÿëñÿ è ïðîñèò ïðîùåíèÿ (Khodorkovsky repented and asked forgiveness). Õîäîðêîâñêèé â êîå-÷¸ì ïðèçíàëñÿ (Khodorkovsky admitted to doing something wrong). Here "â êîå-÷¸ì" is a nice touch: It conveys the sense of "something, but not everything, and maybe not what you expect."

So what's going on here is something of a religious conversion. In fact, one author writes: Õîäîðêîâñêèé -- ãëàñ âîïèþùåãî â ïóñòûíå (Khodorkovsky is a voice crying out in the wilderness). That quote came from the web site of the Communist Party. I guess there was a religious conversion there, as well.

Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.

Source

Created: 14.04.2004 13:22 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:55 MSK, 5 hours 53 minutes ago

MosNews

The lawyers of the scientist Igor Sutyagin, sentenced to 15 years of prison for espionage, filed an appeal to the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The defense declared that “considerable violations of the Criminal Procedure Code have been made” during the process, the lawyer Anna Stavitskaya was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying. In particular, the staff change in the court of jury was ungrounded, and some arguments considered by the court were inadmissible, she said.

Stavitskaya, quoted by the agency, added that some of the questions set before the jurors went beyond the charge: in particular, they had to say whether Sutyagin was acting on the instructions of foreign intelligence, although he had not been charged with doing so.

The defense has filed a short appeal, Stavitskaya was quoted by the agency as saying. A longer one will by filed only after the lawyers become familiar with the protocols of the court session.

The Moscow City Court sentenced Sutyagin on April 7. Two days before, the jury found him guilty of espionage and said he deserved no leniency.

Sutyagin, an arms control specialist with the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies, was accused of having five meetings with foreign intelligence agents to whom he passed on information on air-to-air missiles, the MIG-29SMT fighter jet, plans for Russia’s strategic nuclear forces up to 2007, the Defense Ministry’s work in 1998 to implement plans to develop permanent readiness units and about the structure and condition of the Russian early warning system.

The jury found him guilty on all charges. Sutyagin did not plead guilty, claiming his research on civilian-military relations in Russia was based on non-classified sources, such as newspaper articles and publicly available government documents. As a civilian researcher with no security clearance, he did not have access to any classified materials.

The Federal Security Service (FSB), however, says that the accuracy of the research indicates that Sutyagin must have used classified documents to draw his conclusions.

Source

Izvestia, April 14, 2004

Article by Sergey Leskov: "A Martyr of Science, or How Scientist Sutyagin Became a Beria Accomplice"

It was announced on the eve of Cosmonautics Day that preparations for
razing the aging and crumbling Space Pavilion at the former Exhibition
of the Achievements of the USSR National Economy are under way. And in
that same week, sentence was pronounced in the case against Institute of
the USA and Canada sector director Igor Sutyagin. While the public had
doubts about his guilt, the court didn't even feel that the
scientist-spy deserved condescension. The disconnectedness and
dissimilarity of the events notwithstanding, there is something of a
relationship between them.

Many years ago, it was in the Space Pavilion the we used to receive our
blessing as we crossed into higher education. First-year tutor Aleksandr
Serebrov, who never even thought that he would become a merited
cosmonaut, grandiloquently concluded: "And these ships will fly ever
higher, and this pavilion will grow ever richer." Inasmuch as our ships
have been flying increasingly lower and less often in the last decade,
it's no surprise that the showcase of cosmonautics -- the Space Pavilion
-- has also fallen into neglect. Cosmonauts that have been discarded on
Earth's shores are doing what they can to survive. One Buran spacecraft
pilot left for America, where he worked as a consultant to former
supostaty. Another cosmonaut, a Hero of the Soviet Union and a native of
the Caucasus, I myself saw being searched meticulously before the eyes
of the public by gallant Highway Patrol officers, following all the
rules. Many cosmonaut brothers went into politics and joined, apparently
out of nostalgia, the Duma Communist faction, which soon became of no
consequence politically. Most cosmonauts, however, are seeking their
purpose in life in the business world, where they are becoming not so
much the engine of their companies, including Western ones, as their
face. Even Boeing has "adorned" itself with one of our cosmonauts. Had
things turned out otherwise, what would Gagarin be doing today?

The brain drain from science (of which cosmonautics is a part) is one of
Russia's most painful problems. We distinguish between the drain of our
brains into Western science and an internal drain -- out of science
altogether. And then we also have the scientist-spy -- an extreme and
abnormal consequence of the situation that gave birth to this
phenomenon. American and English professors don't go into spying --
there's no cause for such a job option. At the dawn of the atomic age,
Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs passed information to Soviet agents not
for money, but out of pacifist considerations. In Soviet times, military
personnel were the most dangerous spies: Colonel Penkovskiy and General
Polyakov were both put in front of a firing squad. Oleg Kalugin,
whatever the controversy about his case, was also a general.

Now the time has come for chasing down scientist-spies -- Professor
Soyfer from Vladivostok, Professor Danilov from Krasnoyarsk, Professor
Babkin from Moscow, ecologist Nikitin from St. Petersburg.... Up until
this moment, indictments against scientists crumbled in court --
Sutyagin took the hit for all of them. Including the American
philanthropist George Soros, who
pulled hundreds of millions of dollars out of his pocket in support of
science when it was down and out, for which he was labeled a spy by
jingoists.

When state orders are not to be seen at the bottom of the well, all you
can do is drink from Western grants. Sutyagin the Spy is not destined to
witness the Century of Freedom -- he was sentenced to 15 years'
confinement. Not every murdering maniac is going to see such severe
punishment. We have here the paradox of the ages: why do we, who declare
that life is what is most precious, sooner pardon a bloodthirsty robber
Barabbas than someone who washes our dirty linen and public or says
things we don't want to hear?

Before Sutyagin, the most famous English spy was Lavrentiy Beria, who
worked at MI-6. Some people feel that Beria and Sutyagin are kindred in
the doubtfulness of their indictments. Others, on the other hand, think
that Sutyagin knew what he was doing, and that such a practice in the
preparation of analytical surveys is abnormal for a scientist. But what
is indicative is that in all of his time in the world of espionage, Igor
Sutyagin received only $20,000 from those successors to James Bond. This
is
the cost of a moderately priced European car. Western tourists pay
thousands of times more for a flight into space aboard a Russian
spacecraft. And without going broke.

If Igor Sutyagin is really a spy, then it's shame on the government.
Things have come to the point where our scientists are ready to sell
themselves for a Hershey bar. And what is also shameful is that we got
the market price for our military secrets. There are two ways to keep
information safe. The first is to jealously guard it. The second is to
create new technologies unattainable by those with long noses. The
harder it gets to do the latter, the more attention should be devoted to
the former. The
General Staff admits that new equipment makes up less than 10 percent of
the Army's inventory. When there is no work for designers, special
services join the fray. And this is one of the reasons why
"scientist-spy" sounds as commonplace as "physician-saboteur" used to.

We need only recall that as we learned later on, physician-saboteurs are
not found in nature. It was simply advantageous to create them. But as
for scientist-spies, we shouldn't be growing them artificially.

By PETER SOLOMON

UPDATED AT 5:02 PM EDT Wednesday, Apr. 14, 2004

Western and Russian observers alike were dismayed last week, when the Moscow City Court convicted researcher Igor Sutyagin of espionage. An apparent miscarriage of justice was one reason, but also troubling was the realization that even jury trials, which occupy a special place in the criminal-justice reform in Russia, could deliver such results. Alarming as it was, the Sutyagin decision is not typical of the much-improved administration of justice in Russia today, nor does it represent how most Russian judges now deal with cases involving state secrets. But cases such as Mr. Sutyagin's hurt the courts' reputation, and suggest that the state security service, the FSB, still finds it hard to deal with the court system's growing transparency.

Mr. Sutyagin was a researcher at the U.S.A.-Canada Institute in Moscow, and had done work for Canadian universities. So there was much interest when, in 1998, he admitted selling to a British firm (allegedly connected to U.S. intelligence) analytical information about Russia's military spending and preparedness (drawn, he insisted, from published and non-classified sources). Arrested by the FSB, he underwent a long trial in the Kaluga regional court on the charge of espionage. In December, 2000, the judge sent his case back for more investigation, saying that the evidence was too vague, and investigators had committed procedural violations.

Three years passed before Mr. Sutyagin's new trial; much had evolved in that time. The FSB transferred the case from Kaluga to federal investigators, so the new trial was held in Moscow City Court, where certain judges had a reputation for reliability in politically sensitive cases. Meanwhile the FSB was finding it harder to win judges' co-operation: In four cases involving alleged passing of sensitive information to foreigners, judges in different regions delivered one conviction with a moderate sentence, two convictions with suspended sentences (that is, no jail time), and one outright acquittal.

Another important change was that the Sutyagin defence team opted for the new trial to take place before a jury. Russian juries have an acquittal rate of about 15 per cent, compared to 0.8 per cent in trials heard by judges. The Moscow judge on the new Sutyagin case selected a jury in November, 2003, but just one month later, a scientist accused of selling classified information to China was acquitted by another jury in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. This alerted the FSB to the new challenge of convincing juries. In February, the security police submitted a bill to the Duma that would remove crimes against the state from the purview of juries.

Meanwhile, both judge and jury in the Sutyagin trial (still in the preliminary phase) were replaced. The new judge, Marina Komarova, had already delivered convictions in two other politically sensitive cases.

The Moscow trial itself was closed, but details found their way into the Russian media. According to the defence team, the judge unreasonably and unfairly refused to ask the jury to rule on whether the information sold by the accused was secret. Her decision might find justification in the Criminal Procedure Code's prohibition against including legal concepts in jury charges, but her refusal to let the defence call expert witnesses to deal with the definition of state secrets was likely a procedural error.

To be sure, Russian law on what constitutes a state secret is vague and complex, and secrets may be defined in government regulations that are themselves inaccessible. But the judge's failure to open this hornet's nest undermined the main argument of the defence. Whether it reflected legal interpretation, personal bias or outside pressure, it has discredited the proceedings.

Mr. Sutyagin's lawyers will appeal the verdict, and his 15-year sentence, to the Russian Supreme Court; they have already complained to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The Supreme Court's record in enforcing procedural standards is good, but the threat of review by the Strasbourg court should tip the balance. Hundreds of complaints against Russian court decisions await consideration in Strasbourg. Last year, the Supreme Court reminded judges that agreements signed by the Russian Federation and decisions of the Strasbourg court were binding in Russian law. To date, Russia has accepted all three decisions rendered against it by the court in Strasbourg.

So the Sutyagin case is atypical; 15 years of judicial reform (including the provision to judges of security of tenure, decent salaries and a large dose of self-government) have made judges far more independent than in Soviet times. The accusatorial bias in criminal proceedings has been reduced substantially, through new adversarial trials and tightened rules of evidence. The "returns to supplementary investigations" as an alternative to acquittals has been eliminated. The realm of administrative justice has gained the most: Large numbers of citizens now bring complaints against government officials to court, and win 80 per cent of the time.

However, ensuring fairness in the handling of political crime represents a special challenge for a country with Russia's past. And the Sutyagin case reveals persistent defects: a lack of clarity and transparency about what constitutes a state secret, and what procedures a court should follow in making determinations. If they wish to move forward, Russian authorities must be clearer about what kinds of non-classified information are still restricted in order to protect state security.

Peter H. Solomon, Jr. is the director of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Toronto.

Source

See also: The Russian rule By ROBERT AMSTERDAM

On April 14, 2004 the defense of Igor Sutyagin filed an appeal to the Supreme Court, protesting his conviction. The defense quotes numerous procedural violatioins during the trial, which include withholding evidence that exonerates Igor, as well as incorrect wording of the questions that were posed to the jury.

By Robert Brannon

About five years ago, while working in Moscow as U.S. Naval attache, I met and befriended Igor Sutyagin. Over the course of time, we met often and enjoyed conversations about our respective interests. As an academic researcher, Igor was keenly interested in navies and how they relate to national security. And because we spent so much time together, we came to know each other pretty well. He was a frequent guest at my home and we often met for coffee or chai on Novy Arbat or someplace else near to where we both worked: I was at the U.S. Embassy, he was at the USA and Canada Institute.

Igor never had much money. Once when he was my guest for dinner (attended by several senior military officers and a few rising diplomats from both our countries), he didn't have the means to offer the customary hostess gift. Instead, when I escorted him to my apartment door, following the usual security checks, he presented my wife with a little package. We had been to Suzdal not long before and Igor knew we were fond of visual images that try to catch Russia at its best. When we opened the package after the guests had left that night, we found a small collection -- maybe four or five -- of simple photographs of Suzdal's landscape, churches and icons, some set against a sunset made the more spectacular by ice and snow. I've since had those snapshots framed and they hang in a place of honor in my home. Every time I walk by that little collection of photographs I think of Igor.

He had a shy, quirky little smile -- anyone who knows him remembers that. And he was smart, really smart. But he never stole anything and he was no traitor. I remember asking him once what he thought about some of the people who were causing Russia so much trouble, environmentalists who were drawing attention to some of the most horrific aspects of the Soviet legacy in Russia: Igor had no sympathy for them. He was a pragmatic man who valued patriotism and was very proud to be Russian.

He laughed at my awkwardness in adapting to Russian life, offered me good advice and always tried to help. An archetypical academic, he was uninterested in money. I usually picked up the tab when we went out, but that was just because I had more money than he did. He was always sheepish about that, but pragmatic nonetheless. We struck up a pretty good friendship over the years and we would often call each other during a routine working day. There are many Russian holidays, a lot of them military in nature, and Igor loved to call me and wish me happy "Navigator's Day," for example, because he knew I was a Naval flight officer.

Occasionally, when one of us was puzzled by something relating to current events between our two nations, we met to talk about it. Sometimes one would ask the other for information about why Russia or the United States behaved as it did, especially about naval matters. Once, Igor asked me why the United States was still building high-tech submarines when the Cold War was over. I gave him the usual story about security and defense in an uncertain world and he seemed happy with that explanation. I also handed him a copy of All Hands magazine, a fairly ubiquitous U.S. Navy glossy publication that contains information on policy and personnel issues. That particular issue was focused on submarines and life at sea while serving on submarine duty -- pretty lightweight compared to the weighty statistics that usually occupied Igor. Still, he was intrigued that my country would be so willing to publish this kind of information openly and he was happy to have a copy to take back to his office.

When the Russian Navy decided to send a small ship into the Adriatic during the early stages of NATO's military intervention in Kosovo, I called Igor to ask his opinion. That phone call would later haunt us both because, unknown to us, we were being watched all the time. Audiotaped by surveillance, that conversation was later used against us during our respective "trials" (his was in a cage, mine was merely on television). I asked Igor to tell me what he thought about the small ship, an AGI. Igor told me what I pretty much knew already: That the ship was certainly capable of carrying small arms and perhaps even shoulder-fired missiles, but that it was unlikely any Russian ship might ever actually fire on a U.S. aircraft.

About three months after that episode, Igor was arrested for espionage.

It took them more than a year before they finally expelled me in a round of reciprocity in the wake of the Robert Hanssen case in the United States and the subsequent expulsion of a number of Russian "diplomats."

On March 27, 2001, the day Russia threw me out, RTR's evening news ran a five minute video "documentary" about the supposedly nefarious activities associated with my job as Naval attachÎ. Prominently featured in that newscast was Igor Sutyagin, videotaped in my presence, and accused of spying by exchanging information with "foreigners" that was damaging to Russia's national security. I will never forget the narrator saying that one of the most "guilty" aspects of the case against Igor was the stack of foreign newspapers and magazines piled in his little office at the USA and Canada Institute.

The phone call about the ship and its potential impact on the crisis in Kosovo had been taped and "doctored" to appear to incriminate us both. There was my question to Igor, asking if he had "received the envelope I sent to him." Gone was the next line, in which Igor thanked me for the dinner invitation that was inside the envelope.

The simple difference between us was that I had immunity and he did not. All I got was a hard time, some relatively benign harassment, and a trip to the airport. Igor got hard time literally, and has now been sentenced to 15 years in a Russian prison. His only crime was that he had a passion for navies and he liked to talk to foreigners. I was one of the foreigners whom he liked to talk to and for that I am eternally grateful, if sad for his fate. I will always remember walking through Moscow with him and talking about things we were interested in -- innocent things like whether or not Russia's Navy might be better off following Britain's example of a slightly smaller but much more capable force. Those were great debates and I am richer for having known him.

I cherish those pictures of Suzdal that Igor took with his camera when he was still free to watch a sunset. He was a free spirit when he was free and his soul will outlive the souls of those who have imprisoned him. He is alive today but he is not free.

So please take just a brief moment to pause from your routine and think about Igor Sutyagin -- call upon whatever deity you wish and ask that he be given a little respite from his grief.

I knew Igor Sutyagin. He was and is a very good man. And he will always be my friend.

Robert Brannon, U.S. Naval attache in Moscow from 1998 to 2001, holds the chief of naval operations chair at the National Defense University's National War College. The views expressed are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the U.S. Navy, National Defense University or the National War College. A version of this comment first appeared on Johnson's Russia List.

Source

By Victor Yasmann

The recent conviction of researcher Igor Sutyagin on espionage charges is only the latest in a spate of similar cases in Putin's Russia involving researchers, journalists, diplomats, and former security agents accused of having improper contacts with foreigners.

An unidentified spokesman for a Russian secret service told Interfax on 9 April that Western intelligence agencies -- particularly those of the United States -- have stepped up their work against Russia. "Among all the special services involved in intelligence activity against Russia over the last five years, the most active has been U.S. intelligence," the source said.

The statement was made in connection with the recent conviction on espionage charges of researcher Igor Sutyagin, who was sentenced on 7 April to 15 years' imprisonment for spying for the United States.

Sutyagin, a former researcher with the Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada, was arrested by Federal Security Service (FSB) agents in Kaluga on 27 October 1999. He was accused of passing state secrets to a British consulting firm that the FSB charges was a front organization for U.S. intelligence. Throughout his ordeal, Sutyagin has maintained his innocence, saying that he never had access to secret information and that all the information he provided was culled from open sources.

The role of the security organs, police, and intelligence services in the domestic and international affairs of Putin's Russia has become so pronounced that journalists have been obliged to invent the euphemism "siloviki" to avoid constantly enumerating the security agencies involved.On 9 April, the new political movement Committee 2008, which was formed recently by a group of liberal politicians and journalists, released a statement calling the Sutyagin verdict "unjust and biased because the trial failed to establish that secrets were indeed passed or that the foreign citizens with whom Sutyagin was linked worked for foreign intelligence services," polit.ru reported.

The same day, Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada Director Sergei Rogov described the Sutyagin sentence as "overly severe," adding that he hopes the Supreme Court will "revise it," lenta.ru reported. "I am displeased that the institute has been depicted in the mass media as a nest of the CIA," Rogov said, "and by the fact that we have drawn the attention of the intelligence services. But how can one judge the level of the interest of the secret services [to the institute]? I cannot say that that interest has increased in recent years."

The Sutyagin trial is just one of a spate of similar cases involving researchers, journalists, diplomats, and former security agents accused of having improper contacts with foreigners. Here are some of the major cases from recent years.

1996: Navy Captain Aleksandr Nikitin was arrested and accused of divulging state secrets in a report he prepared for the Norwegian ecological organization Bellona on the radioactive contamination of the Barents Sea by the Northern Fleet. The St. Petersburg Municipal Court acquitted him in December 1999.

1997: Military journalist and Navy Captain Grigorii Pasko and charged with giving state secrets to Japanese journalists. In December 2001, he was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison. He was granted early release from prison in January 2003.

1998: Senior diplomat Valentin Moiseev was arrested and charged with spying for South Korea. In 1999, a Moscow court convicted him and sentenced him to 12 years' imprisonment. That sentence was later reduced to 4 1/2 years.

1999: Pacific Ocean Studies Institute Professor Vladimir Shchurov was arrested in Vladivostok and accused of disclosing state secrets to China. In August 2003, he was convicted and sentenced to two years probation. He was immediately released under an amnesty.

1999: Businessman Viktor Kalyadin was arrested and accused of spying for the United States. He was convicted and sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment in October 2001.

2000: The Baltic Fleet Military Court sentenced Navy Captain Sergei Velichko to five years' imprisonment after convicting him of spying for Sweden. Velichko reportedly confessed that he had worked for Swedish intelligence since 1996.

2000: Retired U.S. Naval Intelligence officer Edmund Pope was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment by a Moscow court for spying for the United States. He was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin and sent back to the United States.

2000: Bauman Moscow State Technical University Professor Anatolii Babkin was arrested in August 2000 together with Edmund Pope on charges of spying for the United States. In February 2003 he was convicted and given eight years' probation.

2001: Krasnoyarsk Technological Institute physicist Valentin Danilov was arrested and accused of spying for China. He was acquitted by a jury in December 2003.

2003: Former FSB officer and lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin is arrested and accused of revealing state secrets. His case is now before the Moscow Military District Court.

"Nezavisimaya gazeta" on 7 April published a primer of 16 such cases.

Some analysts believe that Sutyagin was unlucky in that he was arrested in 1999, when Putin was FSB director. FSB officers now are taking particular pains to show that cases developed during that period were sound. However, there can be little doubt that the escalating phenomenon of "spymania" is a result of the renaissance that the former KGB apparatus has undergone since Putin came to power in 2000.

Domestic and foreign observers alike have lost count of the number of former KGB, FSB, military intelligence (GRU), and Foreign Intelligence Service (GRU) officers who have been given senior positions within the presidential administration, the government, and regional administrations. In addition, many have become regional governors or have been elected to national and local legislatures. And many of these figures do not conceal their desire to revenge the disorientation and humiliation they experienced during the reform era of the 1990s.

The role of the security organs, police, and intelligence services in the domestic and international affairs of President Putin's Russia has become so pronounced that journalists have been obliged to invent the euphemism "siloviki" in order to avoid constantly enumerating the security agencies involved. Moreover, the visible role played by security veterans in public life must not be allowed to obscure that fact that a much larger number of people who owe their political careers to their covert collaboration with the Soviet-era security organs are very likely occupying many crucial positions in Russia today.

Titles glorifying various KGB operations can increasingly be found on the shelves of Russian-language bookstores.Their names are unknown -- and will likely never be known -- because Russia has never adopted a lustration law that would have purged the state apparatus of secret-police collaborators. In fact, such a law has never been seriously discussed in Russia. The only person who tried, unsuccessfully, to get a lustration bill through the Duma was Democratic Russia leader Galina Starovoitova, who was assassinated in St. Petersburg in November 1998. The men accused of carrying out that killing are now on trial in St. Petersburg, although the case so far has revealed little about the motivation or the organizers of the crime.

The enhanced role of former KGB and other secret-service veterans in Russia has given impetus to a real process of cultural counterrevolution in Russian society, one that is reacting against the liberal values of the 1990s reforms and is seeking a return to Soviet traditions and norms.

It is impossible to go into any Russian-language bookstore anywhere in the world without noticing the dozens of recent titles glorifying various KGB operations. In addition, all the national television stations in Russia are heavily running Soviet movies, many of which are devoted to the glorious struggle of the KGB against Western "imperialist" intelligence agencies. Newer programs frequently glorify the exploits of Russian special-forces troops fighting in Chechnya. All of these phenomena are melding together into the emergent ideology of national revanche, and it is not surprising that in such an atmosphere a jury found Sutyagin guilty and also ruled that did "not deserve leniency."

Supporters of Putin often argue that it is natural that he, a former intelligence officer, would rely on his colleagues just as a president with a business background might be expected to bring private-sector representatives into his administration. But whatever the motive, the result is that spymania and other attributes of the secret-service mentality will continue to be prominent elements of Russian public life, and domestic policy will continue to be transformed into little more than a series of special operations.

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The site is under construction and will be up and running in the next few days. Right now you can subscribe to updates. Please, do - this will show us that you are interested. Use the form on the left or on this page.

The purpose of this site is to gather support for Igor Sutyagin, a Moscow researcher accused by the Russian security service, the FSB, of treason and espionage.

Igor was found guilty after a jury trial at the Moscow City Court and then sentenced to 15 years in hard labor. He insists that he is innocent and has appealed the court decision. Igor belives that he was denied his chance to get a fair trial. The many irregularities during the trial give the defense enough grounds for an appeal.

Virtually all who knew Igor and most of his colleagues believe that he is not guilty and his prosecution is simply an example of the power that the FSB has over the Russian judicial system. The FSB has failed to present any evidence of any wrongdoing by Igor. All the case is based on FSB's unsubstantiated claims.

By Richard Warburton, Birmingham Post

A Midland stately home and the University of Birmingham unwittingly found themselves at the centre of an international espionage scandal which ended with a Russian spy being jailed for 15 years.

A Moscow court sentenced Igor Sutyagin to a maximum security prison after finding him guilty of passing on information on nuclear submarines and missile-warning systems while he was attending a University of Birmingham conference at Wast Hills House, Kings Norton, in February 1998.

While staying at the stately home, which was formerly owned by the Cadbury family, Sutyagin met officials from British firm Alternative Futures, which prosecutors claimed was a front for the CIA.

Sutyagin, who was convicted of treason in the form of espionage by a jury in Moscow, maintained that the analyses he wrote and passed on were based on open sources and that he had no reason to believe the British company was a US intelligence cover.

The 39-year-old attended the conference as a representative of the USA-Canada Institute, a Moscow thinktank, and repeatedly protested his innocence.

A physicist and historian from the town of Obninsk, a Soviet-era closed town of scientists south of Moscow, Sutyagin joined the Moscow thinktank as a postgraduate student in 1988 and had risen to head its military-political studies department by the time he was arrested.

After meeting with Alternative Futures in Birmingham, Sutyagin agreed to work for the London-based firm as a consultant.

He flew to meet officials from the company in Warsaw and Budapest, receiving a fee of £14,000, and was arrested by Russian security agents in Moscow in 1999.

Alternative Futures and its consultant, Sean Kidd, then vanished, leaving Russian officials to believe it was linked to the CIA.

The Moscow City Court sentenced Sutyagin to 15 years in a maximum security prison and ruled that his prison term be counted from the moment of his detention.

"I absolutely do not consider myself guilty," Sutyagin maintained after the sentencing. "All my guilt is that I had contacts with foreigners."

His lawyer German Gavryunin said "the defence categorically does not agree with the punishment" and added that they would be appealing against the sentence in the Supreme Court.

Human rights advocates said the case demonstrated the renewed grip of the Federal Security Service, the KGB's main successor, which was deeply suspicious of Russian scientists' contacts with foreigners.

They claim its agents had been emboldened by the rise of ex-KGB agent and FSB director Vladimir Putin to the presidency.

Courts have only challenged a small number of similar cases.

In December, a jury acquitted Valentin Danilov, a professor at Krasnoyarsk Technical University in Siberia who had been charged with selling classified information on space technology to China and misappropriating university funds.

A University of Birmingham spokeswoman yesterday said Wast Hills House was owned by the university and was used to hold conferences which people attended from all over the world.

Source

The social committee 2008: Free Choice made an announcement on Friday condemning the sentence passed on Russian scientist Igor Sutyagin who was jailed for 15 years for espionage.

In the text of the announcement received by MosNews the sentence is called “unjust and biased”.

The committee declared that it was not proven that Sutyagin had passed on information containing state secrets, nor that foreigners who had received this information had been connected with intelligence services. “Furthermore, the court knew that Sutyagin had no access to any classified materials, had not used any sources of secret information, so that it was the matter only of analyzing open sources,” the committee’s statement said.

It concludes that “Sutyagin was convicted only for having shared his views, his point of view on some ’sensible’ topics connected with the development of the armed forces and the defense complex of the country, with some foreigners”.

The committee explains that the Russian authorities were so “assertive” in their efforts to convict Sutyagin because “five years ago when the FSB (Federal Security Service) brought the charge against the scientist, this agency was led by none other than (current president) Vladimir Putin”.

It is stressed in the statement that the most “deplorable” fact is that Sutyagin was found guilty by a jury. Russian society “pin its hopes of the revival of a really civilized justice system with the introduction” of courts of jury, the committee said in the statement. But Sutyagin’s case has shown that “the appearance of a bench with twelve jurors in the courtroom is not enough to consider the judicial reform as successfully finished”.

The committee declared that the court of jury had turned out to be a new instrument of the arbitrariness of the state.

“From now on, any researcher, expert or journalist can be convicted for having brought into the world conclusions made on the basis of open information but that seemed ’secret’ to the authorities. And if so, from now on, any critical article analyzing the situation in the army and military industrial complex can be declared a disclosure of a state secret, and its author can be persecuted. And even more so, from now on, any ’unapproved contact’ with a citizen of a foreign state can be at will compared to high treason even if no one manages to prove that during that intercourse a malevolent foreigner succeeded to worm something really secret,” the statement said.

The committee declared that the unjust verdict against Sutyagin was “evidence of a direct offensive by the authorities against the very foundation of a democratic constitutional system in Russia”.

The co-chairmen of the committee are the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, former co-leader of the liberal Union of Right Forces Boris Nemtsov and journalist Sergei Parkhomenko.

Parkhomenko told MosNews that their statements would appear in any case of an unjust sentence, even if it was not based on a jury verdict. But he said that the court of jury is a “progressive technology” and it was supposed that its introduction would entail other changes in the judicial system, such as the establishment of a mechanism of jurors’ selection.

Sutyagin’s lawyer had earlier told MosNews that he had suspicions there were officers of the security services among the new jurors.

“The authorities are not ready to force the changes, but are satisfied with the current situation,” Parkhomenko said.

Source

ST. PETERSBURG—The Moscow City court sentenced Russian weapons specialist Igor Sutyagin to 15 years in jail for spying for the United States—the latest in a series of controversial espionage trials under President Vladimir Putin that have caught the attention of ecological and human rights groups throughout the world, as well the US government.

Rashid Alimov, Charles Digges, 2004-04-07 20:35

The verdict, which came Monday—after an 11-day closed trial—and the harsh sentence delivered at Wednesday’s sentence hearing have served as bone-chilling reminder to Russian scientist, researchers, environmentalists and international human rights groups that the power of Russia’s Soviet-style secret services are on an upsurge with ex- KGB Colonel President Vladimir Putin—and an obsequiously pro-Putin State Duma—at the helm.

The US State Department questioned the fairness of Sutyagin's closed trial, criticizing it for its "lack of transparency and due process."

"The way it was handled has to raise questions about the conclusions of the case," deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said in a statement after a jury convicted Sutyagin on Monday.

Boris Kuznetsov, one of Sutyagin’s lawyers, quickly fingered the Russian government as having planted emissaries among the jurors, and said that they worked throughout deliberations to influence the outcome against Sutyagin.

“I have such information,” said Kuznetsov with the Russian news web site Strana.ru after the sentencing. “I got a phone call from a person who introduced himself as one of the jurors and he said that among them were two informal leaders that were pressuring the other jurors.”

Kuznetsov, however, was quick to point out that he could not be sure if these two men represented Russia’s secrect services or if they were just people who were talked into assisting the government’s case. He said he planned to thoroughly review the list of jurors on the case in the coming days for possible connections between jurors and the Russian secret services.

15 years’ hard labour
The Moscow City Court ordered that Sutyagin—who was convicted of spying while he worked for Russia's respected USA-Canada Institute—should serve his sentence in a prison camp with a special hard labour regime. It is as yet unclear, said a spokesman for the Prosecutor General’s office, what prison camp he will be sent to.

The FSB accused Sutyagin of collecting material on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems and passing it on to US Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, officers through a British consultancy firm called Alternative Futures. The FSB claims Alternative Futures was a front operation for the CIA. Sutyagin maintained the information he gathered came exclusively from open sources and had been passed onto the British firm on the basis of a legal freelance contract.

Sutyagin, who has been in jail since his arrest in October 1999 by Russia's Feral Security Service, or FSB—the successor organization to the KGB—protested his innocence in court Wednesday.

Sutyagin was found guilty of espionage on Monday in a unanimous decision by a 12 member jury that many rights activists in Russia say was stacked with agents from the FSB agents. Sutyagins trial by jury—a right guaranteed in the Russian Constitution, but seldom practiced—was one of the first jury trials to be conducted after the Russian judiciary started experimenting with them in 2002.

"The only thing I am guilty of is that I had contacts with foreigners," he said, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

One lawyer on his defence team, Anna Stavistkaya told reporters that Sutyagin was “in a state of shock” after hearing the sentence.

"He had hoped for more than four years that a jury would understand this case."

The verdict and the harsh sentence were even more unthinkable following the acquittal by jury of Valentin Danilov, a professor at Krasnoyarsk Technical University in Siberia, who had been charged with selling classified information on space technology to China and misappropriating university funds—a major defeat for the FSB.

FSB colonel calls the verdict and sentence a ‘warning’
The FSB and prosecutors, who had pushed for a 17-year jail term, expressed satisfaction at the outcome.

“Of course we are pleased with the outcome,” said an FSB lieutenant colonel that asked his name not be used, in a telephone interview with Bellona Web. “We have worked on this case for a number of years, and finally proved we are right—he is a spy.”

Asked whether researchers, environmentalists and scientists working in Russia should consider this a warning, the FSB Colonel said “absolutely.”

“This should serve as warning to scientists, ecological organizations, journalists and others who often exchange information with foreigners. There has been far too much of that over the past few years and that will change,” he added. He also denied that the FSB had tampered with the jury.

But his triumphant words echo a growing sentiment that was begun two yeas ago when Putin declared during public remarks that foreign environmental organizations frequently engage in espionage work.

FSB ‘vents’ its rage on Igor Sutyagin with a guilty verdict
A Russian jury on Monday found arms control researcher Igor Sutyagin guilty of treason for passing secrets to the United States, sending a chill through the Russian scientific community and confirming fears of a resurgence of Soviet-era KGB tactics.

The unanimous verdict of guilt—which human rights groups world-wide have decried as part of a witch hunt by ex-KGB Colonel and President Vladimir Putin’s re-emerging secret services— came after three hours of deliberation by the 12-member jury. Some human rights activists in Russia have even accused the prosecution of stacking the jury with FSB agents in order to assure a conviction.

Defence says jurors manipulated
The defence team has accused the prosecutors of pressuring the jurors and Judge Marina Komarova of manipulating them by asking them to consider the wrong questions when evaluating Sutyagin’s alleged guilt of espionage.

Indeed, of the four questions Komarova asked jurors to consider in deciding their verdict, none contained a reference to state secrets—even though the prosecution alleged that Sutyagin sold information containing state secrets to Alternative Futures, the alleged British cover for US intelligence.

The first two questions given to the jury by Komarova asked whether Sutyagin had been recruited by a "foreign defence intelligence service" and whether he had been paid for the information he passed over to that service, according to Kuznetsov, who spoke to Bellona Web in a telephone interview from Moscow Tuesday. The third question was whether Sutyagin should be found guilty based on the answers to the first two questions, while the fourth was whether he deserved leniency. The jury was unanimous on the first three questions and split, with four for and eight against leniency—something Komarova would legally have had to act on had the jurors voted for it when sentencing Sutyagin. Wednesday’s sentence makes clear lenience was not on Komarova’s mind.

Defense to mount an appeal
Sutyagin’s lawyers say they will appeal the case to the Russian Supreme Court and, if that fails, to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasborg.

"It was an expected ruling after the jury's verdict, the court had grossly violated the due process of the trial," said Sutyagin defence lawyer Kuznetsov to reporters in Moscow outside the courtroom, Agencie France Press reported.

Sutyagin’s employer offers tepid support
USA-Canada Institute Director Sergei Rogov said in an interview Wednesday with the Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy that Sutyagin’s contact with the British firm was his undoing, and had Sutyagin approached him prior to contracting with Alternative Futures, Rogov said he would have advised Sutyagin against it. And, although Sutyagin remains on the USA-Canada Institute staff as a vote of support, Rogov’s comments fell short of a ringing endorsement of his colleague’s innocence.

“You can’t do such things,” as make contracts with foreigners, said Rogov. “[Sutyagin] of course, didn’t transfer any information of a secret nature because he didn’t have access to it. But he is a good analyst and could fully, gathering information from open sources, newspapers, magazines, produce analyses and prognoses for his foreign partner that could damage the interests of Russia.”

Despite several calls by Bellona Web, Rogov could not be reached for further comment.

Sutyagin’s arrest, previous trials, and judicial irregularities
While working for the Moscow-based USA and Canada Institute, Sutyagin was arrested by FSB agents in Kaluga in October 1999 and was charged with selling information on nuclear submarines to Alternative Futures. Sutyagin has said repeatedly that he did not have any reason to believe the British company was an intelligence cover.

Sutyagin’s trial initially began in the Kaluga regional court in February of 2001, two years after his arrest. The trial proceeding in fits and starts, and was delayed several times. During the hearings, several violations of procedure were evident. In December 2001, the court declared the case against Sutyagin groundless, and sent the case back for further investigation. Sutyagin, meanwhile, remained in jail.

Sutyagin's lawyers got the case transferred to the Moscow City Court last year, and the court agreed to their request for a jury trial in October. The new trial—closed because of secrecy concerns about involved documents—began in November of 2003

In February of 2004, Judge Pyotor Shtunder withdrew himself from the case without giving any reason and was replaced by Komarova. The original jury, chosen in November 2003, was also dismissed and a new one selected under Komarova, who has jailed a number of high-profie accused spies.

Human rights activists rally around Sutyagin
In January, four international rights groups protested to the Council of Europe democracy body that Sutyagin was "the target of politically-motivated treason charges" and was being denied the right to a fair trial.

One man who has been through that legal meat-grinder is investigative journalist Grigory Pasko, who, in 1997, exposed the illegal dumping of radioactive waste by the Russian navy in the Pacific Ocean to Japanese media, and received a four-year jail sentence for "espionage" and "high treason" before being released on parole last year. He is now editor of Bellona’s Russian-language “Environment and Rights” magazine.

“Fifteen years for an innocent man [Sutyagin] is payback for all the case they have lost, and two, the [Alexander] Nikitin and the Danilov case, which they lost spectacularly,” said Pasko in an email interview with Bellona Web. Bellona’s Nikitin fought a five year legal battle with Russian authorities for publishing open information about submarine accidents in a Bellona report. He was fully acquitted in January 2000.

“That [Sutyagin’s] sentence would be unequivocally guilty has been clear for a long time: the Soviet KGB spook system is not accustomed to exonerating a person after they have already been sitting in jail for several years,” Pasko said.

Internationally renowned Russian human rights lawyer Yury Schmidt.
Viktor Teryoshkin/Bellona



Yury Schmidt, one of Russia’s most respected human rights lawyers agreed with Pasko’s assessment.

“I am very disappointed that it all came to this,” he told Bellona Web in telephone interview Wednesday. “They dragged out the case for such a long time that to count on an exoneration was impossible. especially after the exoneration of Danilov. I don’t think that the court was objective.”

Pasko added his voice to the many who insist that jury selection was manipulated by the FSB.

“I won’t believe for anything that people chosen at random by a computer unanimously found a person guilty just because the FSB said the documents [composed by Sutyagin] were secret,” he said. “Then eight of these 12 people didn’t find cause for leniency [in the sentencing portion of the trial].”

Maria Lipman of the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and editor of the Russian quarterly “Pro et Contra,” was, like other human rights activists, amazed by the length of the sentence and its disproportion to the alleged crime in a phone interview with Bellona Web.

“Today’s sentence was a surprise because all previous events with accusations of espionage ended either with exoneration, or a softer sentence—and that despite the fact that the FSB was demanding the maximum sentence,” said Lipman, who is also a frequent contributor to such respected western publications as The Washington Post newspaper and “The New Yorker” magazine.

“One wants to believe that this is not a turn in state policy, but a personal agreement of the judge with certain agencies.”

Indeed, agreements between courts and security services would not represent a turn in state policy at all. It would be a reminder that Russian justice is still conducted behind closed doors where prosecutors target individuals and do everything possible to get them convicted. Even jury trails—Russia’s most hopeful step toward normalizing its legal system in many years—remain subject to the backroom agreement.

Charles Digges reported from Oslo and Rashid Alimov reported from St. Petersburg.

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ST. PETERSBURG—A Russian jury on Monday found arms control researcher Igor Sutyagin guilty of treason for passing secrets to the United States, sending a chill through the Russian scientific community and confirming fears of a resurgence of Soviet-era KGB tactics.

Rashid Alimov, Charles Digges, 2004-04-06 18:50

The unanimous verdict of guilt—which human rights groups world-wide have decried as part of a witch hunt by ex-KGB Colonel and President Vladimir Putin’s re-emerging secret services— came after three hours of deliberation by the 12-member jury. Some human rights activists in Russia have even accused the prosecution of stacking the jury with FSB agents in order to assure a conviction.

Sutyagin, a scholar at Moscow's respected USA and Canada Institute, was jailed in October 1999 on charges that he had sold nuclear submarine and missle warning systems information to a British company that Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, investigators claim was a United States Central Intelligence Agency cover organization.

Sutyagin’s case is one of many high-profile spy cases against Russian researchers. Sutyagin denies that he is guilty and has maintained the analyses he wrote for the British firm were based on open sources, and that he had no reason to believe the British company was an intelligence cover. The conviction carried with it a 10 to 20 year sentence. A spokesman at Russia’s Prosecutor General’s office told Bellona Web that prosecutors will aim for 17 years at the sentencing hearing.

That sentencing hearing is widely reported as being scheduled for Wednesday April 14th, though the Russian news site Grani.ru, said it may come as soon as Wednesday April 7th.The spokesman for the Prosecutor General, who asked his name not be used said only that the sentence would be passed “soon.”

Officials contacted by Bellona Web at the Moscow City Court refused to comment on the case.

Human rights advocates say the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the KGB's main successor, is deeply suspicious of Russian scientists' contacts with foreigners. They say that its agents have been emboldened by the rise of Putin, who was also once the director of the FSB, to the presidency and his easy landslide victory into his second term last Month.

In only a few instances have courts challenged such cases as Sutyagin’s. In December, a jury acquitted Valentin Danilov, a professor at Krasnoyarsk Technical University in Siberia, who had been charged with selling classified information on space technology to China and misappropriating university funds.

A court had been expected to deliver a verdict in the Sutyagin case in 2001, but instead instructed prosecutors to continue investigating and left Sutyagin in jail. Russian courts, including the Supreme Court, had repeatedly denied his request to await trial out of jail.

World human rights groups' comment on the Sutyagin verdict
Sutyagin's case is part of a pattern of arbitrary prosecutions of independent scientists, journalists and environmentalists in Russia who work on sensitive topics.


Was the jury manipulated by the judge?

Sutyagin's lawyer Boris Kuznetsov was quick to decry the verdict, charging that Moscow City Court Judge Marina Komarova unfairly swayed the jury of nine men and three women. "I believe the judge has manipulated the jury," the visibly upset lawyer told reporters outside the courtroom, The Moscow Times reported.

Prominent Russian ecological and human rights activist Ernst Cherny was quick to agree.

“The judge manipulated the trial—she didn’t let to the defense present its proof and the conclusions of independent experts,” he said in a telephone interview with Bellona Web. “The questions to the jury were worded monstrously.”

In January, four international human rights groups said that Sutyagin was "the target of politically motivated treason charges" and urged the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to appoint a rapporteur on his case.

"Sutyagin's case is part of a pattern of arbitrary prosecutions of independent scientists, journalists and environmentalists in Russia who work on sensitive topics," the four groups—including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—said.

Jury not asked to weigh espionage content of case

Indeed, of the four questions Komarova asked jurors to consider in deciding their verdict, none contained a reference to state secrets—even though the prosecution maintained that Sutyagin sold information containing state secrets to a British company that was a cover for US intelligence.

The first two questions asked whether Sutyagin had been recruited by a "foreign defence intelligence service" and whether he had been paid for the information he passed over to that service, according to Kuznetsov, who spoke to Bellona Web in a telephone interview from Moscow Tuesday. The third question was whether Sutyagin should be found guilty based on the answers to the first two questions, while the fourth was whether he deserved leniency.

“Meanwhile, there is no question about whether these data were state secrets. This means, the questions [given the jury by the judge] don’t correspond to the essence of the charges,” said Kuznetsov in another interview with Gazeta,ru.

“Sutyagin doesn’t deny he passed the data and took the reward.”

While unanimous in finding Sutyagin guilty, the jury was divided on whether he deserved leniency. Four voted for leniency, while eight voted against it. But since a majority voted against it, the judge will not be required to show leniency when sentencing Sutyagin, Kuznetsov said.

Activist Cherny doubted that leniency would factor into the sentencing.

“The sentence will be brought soon. I don’t doubt, it would be fierce and the FSB will vent all its rage on Sutyagin, they have lost [such cases] so many times,” Cherny said.

Was the jury packed by the FSB?

Several prominent ecological and human rights activists in Russia—who have at one time been accused but later exonerated of FSB charges of espionage—had little doubt in Monday interviews with Bellona Web that Sutyagin’s jury, which was picked in February, had been stacked with FSB agents.

Journalist Grigory Pasko, who was jailed on espionage charges in 2001 by the FSB for exposing the Russian Pacific Fleet’s illegal waste dumping practices, said “the jury certainly wasn’t formed without the comrades from FSB.”

“It is not by chance that there are messages circulating the net saying today’s jury includes three ‘former’ FSB employees,” said Pasko, who is editor-in-chief of Bellona’s Russian language magazine Environment and Rights. Pasko was paroled for good behavior in January 2003 after he had been convicted of intending to pass notes on allegedly secret naval manoeuvres to the Japanese media.

“We can assume it was those three who actively influenced the others in the deliberation room, who told them Sutyagin never denied the fact of passing data to foreigners from unclassified sources.”

Bellona’s Alexander Nikitin said: “It was Sutyagin’s fault from the beginning that he tried to explain to the FSB that he wasn’t guilty. He thought [the former] KGB was searching for the truth, but the investigation was clearly prejudiced.”

In 1995 Nikitin was accused by the FSB of disclosing of state secrets for publishing information about radioactive dangers in the Russian Northern Fleet’s rusted out submarines in a Bellona Foundation report. In 2000, Nikitin was fully acquitted by the Russian Supreme Court.

“There are suspicions that the [12 members of] jury were specially chosen [by FSB]—it’s difficult to prove that, but such unanimity is very dubious,” said Cherny.

Judge has convicted other high-profile espionage defendants

Judge Komarova presided over the convictions of former Russian diplomat Valentin Moiseyev and former KGB General Oleg Kalugin, who both were charged with espionage.

Komarova—who is banned by law from commenting on ongoing trials—made no public comments Monday and would not take calls from Bellona Web on Tuesday. The prosecution team and the jurors left the courtroom without comment, the Moscow Times reported.

Every newspaper in Russia as guilty as Sutyagin

In his closing remarks Monday, Sutyagin maintained his innocence and reiterated that he had relied on open sources in his work, saying that the logic of the accusation against him makes a criminal of every newspaper reader who simply analyzes and compares information.

Sutyagin’s defense team stressed that the researcher never had any access to state secrets or classified information, and thus he can’t be accused of disclosing such information. Furthermore, the accusation against him does not contest that he had no access to state secrets.

"Sutyagin is not denying the fact of the transfer of information, but is asserting that he collected it from open sources and it could not be classified as a state secret," Kuznetsov said.

Arrest, charges and mounting irregularities

While working for the Moscow-based USA and Canada Institute, Sutyagin was arrested by FSB agents in Kaluga in October 1999 and was charged with selling information on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to British company that prosecutors claim was a front organization for the CIA. Sutyagin has said repeatedly that he did not have any reason to believe the British company was an intelligence cover.

Sutyagin’s trial initially began in the Kaluga regional court in February of 2001, two years after his arrest. The trial proceeding in fits and starts, and was delayed several times. During the hearings, several violations of procedure were evident. In December 2001, the court declared the case against Sutyagin groundless, and sent the case back for further investigation. Sutyagin, meanwhile, remained in jail.

Sutyagin's lawyers got the case transferred to the Moscow City Court last year, and the court agreed to their request for a jury trial in October. The new trial—closed because of secrecy concerns about involved documents—began in November of 2003. It was, nonetheless, one of the first jury trials in Russia since the judiciary began experimenting with the right jury trials, which is guaranteed by the Russian constitution but routinely ignored until recently.

In February of 2004, Judge Pyotor Shtunder withdrew himself from the case without giving any reason and was replaced by Komarova. The original jury, chosen in November 2003, was also dismissed and a new one selected under Komarova.

In January, leading human rights organizations appealed to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, saying Sutyagin was the target of a politically driven spy case.

In addition to Sutyagin, other scholars have been accused by the FSB of supplying state secrets to foreigners. Among them is physicist Danilov, who was acquitted by a Krasnoyarsk jury in December on charges of spying for China while working on a commercial contract.

Another scholar, Professor Vladimir Shurov was convicted of espionage by the Primorsky regional court for allegedly passing Russian state secrets to China. He was given a two year suspended sentence and amnestied, but the conviction nonetheless stands.

The measure by which the FSB is so suspicious of Russian scientists’ contact with foreigners can perhaps be judged the apparent system of rewards it has established for those who root out such contacts. On April 1st, Kaluga’s regional FSB director, Valery Loginov—who was the initiator and driving force behind the Sutyagin case—became the region’s vice-governor.

Charles Digges reported from Oslo and Rashid Alimov reported from St. Petersburg.

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