Manipulating the Jury
What the Federal Security Service, or FSB — the main KGB successor — truly seeks is not to protect Russia’s state secrets but to use that concept for repressive purposes.
The guilty verdict passed by the Krasnoyarsk Region Court on 53-year-old physicist Valentin Danilov is the second such case to end in a severe sentence passed by a court of jury in an espionage trial. Another Russian scholar, Igor Sutyagin, was sentenced to 15 years for espionage earlier this year. The situation is strange to say the least.
Last December Valentin Danilov, charged with passing classified information to China and defrauding the university where he worked of $15,500, was acquitted by the majority of jurors, with eight votes to four. Russia’s Supreme Court then overturned the verdict claiming procedural violations by the defense and ordered a retrial. The arguments put forward by the prosecutors, however, in their appeal against the initial verdict seemed particularly doubtful — in fact, the prosecutors complained that the defense had sounded more convincing and pointed out to inconsistencies in the evidence presented by the prosecutors.
The re-trial ended with a new jury passing a guilty verdict. No new evidence was presented in court.
It transpires that a sentence worth 14 years of one’s life is subject to the rules of roulette — i.e. depends solely on the composition and disposition of the jury.
A lot depends on the composition of the jury. In particular, Russian law conveniently does not ban security officers from serving as jurors. But this is not the only point. The point is that the jurors never passed a guilty verdict in the Danilov case at all.
The problem is that unlike, say, murder cases tried by jury, where “the people’s judges” have to decide whether a prisoner in the dock killed or not, in high treason cases they are not requested to decide whether the accused “betrayed or not”.
The question of whether the information passed by Danilov to China contained a state secret was decided by the court, and what’s more, the court did so on the basis of extremely ambiguous criteria — in fact, on the basis of a report presented by the agencies concerned.
After the sentence was pronounced a regional FSB spokesman commented on it as follows: “The court concluded that the physicist had passed to the Chinese data they needed for implementing a defense project.”
A highly obscure remark, indeed. Actually, the act described in such a way clearly cannot be punishable under criminal law. After all, it is clear that far from all the data required to implement a defense project are classified. However, that was the key issue in Danilov’s case.
For several years now the FSB has been waging an indefatigable campaign against lawyers, courts, human rights advocates in so-called spy trials, dozens of which were launched by the emboldened FSB after Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer himself, became president.
Such trials are initiated at the very top. In particular, according to Danilov’s own sources, after his acquittal in December last year FSB director Nikolai Partrushev summoned the Krasnoyarsk FSB chief Subbotin, gave him a severe dressing down and demanded that the case be sent for re-trial and end in a guilty verdict.
When the subject-matter of a dispute is a state secret, the interpretation and concept of which remains highly obscure, the case usually remains closed to the public at large.
In fact, the FSB pursues a policy whereby it is the prerogative of that agency alone to decide what can be considered a state secret and what cannot. Furthermore, a person can be told by the FSB that he has divulged a state secret long after the information was passed.
You would think that to prevent leaks the Federal Security Service and the lawmakers would be interested in developing clear-cut regulations concerning the concept of a state secret and the rules for handling classified information.
In truth however, things are very different. The FSB is interested in making the interpretation of the concept of a state secret and the provisions governing liability for high treason as ambiguous as possible, so the agency can apply them at its own discretion against as many people as it finds necessary.
This is the main reason the FSB continues to demand draconian prison sentences in cases where the alleged guilt, if anything, remains unproven. And this goes to show that the FSB’s true goal is not to protect state secrets but to preserve a repressive mechanism based on the free interpretation of the law. And this is what led renowned Russian scholar and Nobel Prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg in recent televised remarks to compare current espionage trials, including Danilov’s trial, with the show trials of the year 1937.
