Pale Imitation of Justice
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.
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