Scientists suffer human-rights abuses

Around the world, researchers are being harassed, imprisoned and murdered.

Heidi Ledford

news @ nature.com Published online: 25 October 2006; | doi:10.1038/news061023-10

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Russia: Igor Sutyagin

Russian federal officers came for Igor Sutyagin on 27 October 1999. A researcher for the Institute of USA and Canada Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sutyagin's speciality was military policy and nuclear weapons.

The Russian Federal Security Service arrested Sutyagin and charged him with treason and espionage, alleging that he provided classified information to a UK consulting firm. Sutyagin protested that all of the data he provided could be found in the public domain.

Sutyagin's trial started, stopped, and changed judges and juries repeatedly for over four years until he was convicted in April 2004 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, which he is now serving.

Sutyagin's friend Pavel Podvig, a military-policy researcher at Stanford University in California, says the trial never established that Sutyagin had accessed classified information. "The jury was never asked if the prosecutor had proved that the information was secret," says Podvig. "The questions were all very nonspecific."