March 2005 Archives
Report: Russian arms control researcher convicted of espionage refuses to admit guilt in pardon plea
Pravda.ru 16:07 2005-03-24
A Russian arms control researcher who is serving a 15-year sentence for espionage is willing to sign a plea for a presidential pardon but refuses to comply with the requirement that he admit his guilt, his lawyer was quoted Thursday as saying.
Igor Sutyagin, a scholar at Moscow's respected USA and Canada Institute, was arrested in 1999 on charges he sold information on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British company that Russian investigators claimed was a CIA cover.
Sutyagin maintained the analyses he wrote were based on public sources and that he had no reason to believe the British company was an intelligence front.
In April 2004, a jury sentenced Sutyagin to 15 years in prison.
A number of prominent Russian scientists, human rights activists and cultural figures appealed last year to Russian President Vladimir Putin to free Sutyagin, the attorney, Anna Stavitskaya, said in an interview with the Interfax news agency.
A prosecution official visited Sutyagin last month and "strongly recommended that he submit a pardon plea on his own," said Stavitskaya.
The arms control expert did write to the Russian leader but said he was not ready to admit his guilt, and his plea was dismissed as "useless" by prosecution officials, the lawyer said.
International rights organizations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned Sutyagin's conviction, saying he did not get a fair trial.
They also said the Sutyagin case was just one among many aimed against Russian citizens working with foreigners in areas previously under security services' control, including nuclear waste dumping and defense-related issues.
Igor Sutyagin, a scholar at Moscow's respected USA and Canada Institute who is serving a 15-year prison sentence for espionage, is willing to sign a plea for a presidential pardon but refuses to comply with the requirement that he admit his guilt, Interfax reported Thursday.
A prosecution official visited Sutyagin last month and "strongly recommended that he submit a pardon plea on his own," his lawyer told Interfax. Sutyagin wrote to President Vladimir Putin but said he was not ready to admit his guilt. Prosecution officials dismissed his plea as "useless," the lawyer said. (AP)
In April, a Moscow City Court found Igor Sutyagin, a disarmament researcher with the U.S. and Canada Institute, guilty of espionage and sentenced him to 15 years in a maximum security facility (the sentence included time served since his arrest in October 1999). Prosecutors accused Sutyagin of passing classified information about the country's nuclear weapons to a London based firm, but the Kaluga regional court ruled in 2001 that the evidence presented by the prosecutor did not support the charges brought against him and returned the case to the prosecutor for further investigation. Sutyagin claimed the decision was unjust and insisted that he had no access to confidential information. In August, the Supreme Court rejected his appeal. Some observers agreed that he had no access to classified information and regarded the severe sentence as an effort to discourage information sharing by citizens with professional colleagues from other countries. Russian government officials asserted that he had wittingly or unwittingly entered into a paid arrangement with a foreign intelligence service. As a result of the flawed conduct of the trial and lengthy sentence, a number of domestic and international human rights NGOs raised concerns that the charges were politically motivated, and AI declared Sutyagin to be a political prisoner. [...] [T]here was broad agreement among human rights organizations that Sutyagin was a political prisoner [...]
In Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2004, Russia, Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, February 28, 2005
