April 2005 Archives
Institutions, Restoration, and Revolution
By Leon Aron
Posted: Friday, April 15, 2005
RUSSIAN OUTLOOK
AEI Online
Publication Date: April 15, 2005
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Perhaps no other key institution has been so affected by the retreat from the revolutionary achievements of the previous decade as Russia’s legal system.
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Nikitin versus Sutyagin and Danilov. The contrast between the legal environment of the 1990s and that of today is highlighted by a comparison of cases of alleged espionage. In 1995 the Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested Alexander Nikitin, a former navy captain and environmental activist, and charged him with “high treason” for alleged espionage and disclosure of state secrets. Nikitin pleaded not guilty, insisting that he obtained information from unclassified and publicly available sources.
Basing his defense on the constitutional right to “freely seek, receive, pass on, produce, and disseminate information,” as well as the constitutional ban on the application of unpublished laws and the retroactive application of the law, Nikitin obtained a favorable procedural ruling by the Constitutional Court and successfully undermined the legality of the state’s case. The Nikitin case marks the first acquittal in Russian history on a charge of treason brought by state security agencies.
A few years later, the trials of two scholars arrested and accused of very similar crimes followed a markedly different procedure with an opposite outcome. Both Igor Sutyagin, an arms-control scholar with the United States and Canada Institute in Moscow, and Valentin Danilov, a professor and expert on satellite technology at the Krasnoyarsk State Technical University, were charged by the FSB with selling state secrets to foreign companies. Both defendants insisted that the information they had communicated was based entirely on open sources.
In Sutyagin’s case, the court switched juries to include individuals whom the defense argued had connections to the secret services and barred much of the cross-examination. Although the judge in the Sutyagin case ruled that the prosecution had failed to identify the state secrets the defendant allegedly sold to his foreign employers, the scholar was found guilty in April 2004 and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor.
Danilov was acquitted by a jury in December 2003, but six months later the Supreme Court overturned the verdict, siding with the prosecution, which alleged “improper pressuring of the jury” by the defense.[16] The espionage charge was reinstated, and Danilov was rearrested. At a second trial, which was held in the fall of 2004 and closed to the public, the presiding judge banned the defense from presenting evidence that showed that the information passed by Danilov to a Chinese company was unclassified. The list of jurors was never published, and Danilov alleged that they were “acting under pressure.”[17] The scientist was found guilty and received a fourteen-year sentence.
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