Supreme Court Upholds Sentence of Scientist Jailed for Espionage
MosNews
Created: 17.08.2004 13:32 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 15:48 MSK
The Supreme Court of Russia upheld the sentence against scientist Igor Sutyagin on Tuesday.
He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for spying for the United States by the Moscow City Court in April. His lawyers lodged an appeal to a higher authority.
Sutyagin’s lawyer, Boris Kuznetsov, quoted by the Interfax news agency, said that he intended to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. He added that the court of jury that had found the scientist guilty had been formed with a violation of criminal procedure. One of the jurors was simultaneously a candidate to the court of jury of the Moscow district military court, Kuznetsov said. However, the agency quoted Prosecutor General’s Office spokesman Yevgeny Naidyonov as saying that this argument had been rejected by the Supreme Court as groundless.
After the Supreme Court’s ruling was made public, Russian HR activists said they would continue to fight for Sutyagin’s acquittal.
“We will not leave this case asa it is, we will fight for Sutyagin’s freedom till the end. I cannot imagine that Sutyagin, an innocent man, should serve such an enormous term,” the Interfax news agency quoted Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group as saying.
“We have not pinned much hope to the Russian Supreme Court and we hope that Sutyagin’s case will be considered by the International Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. We will use all legal means to set him free. It will be an international campaign,” Alekseyeva said.
A representative of the Russian office of the Human Rights Watch bureau, Aleksander Petrov, told the agency about the procedure violations committed in the course of the process. In particular, he said that investigators shed little lite on the sources where the scientists had taken his information from. The materials proving that Sutyagin used only open sources, were forwarded to the wrong experts and thus, the experts were making conclusions on the basis of insufficient information.
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.
