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By Bret Stephens, The Wall Street Journal, 19 February 2008
[...]
Even more strained was the case against Igor Sutyagin, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' prestigious Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada, who was accused of illicitly disclosing details about Russia's nuclear posture. His "spying," too, amounted to a paper he had written based on open-source information (including speeches by Russia's own defense minister). Yet that didn't prevent a court from handing down a 15-year sentence.
[...]
MOSCOW. March 11 (Interfax) - Igor Sutyagin, a Russian scientist who is serving a 15-year sentence for espionage, will spend three months in solitary confinement.
"He was sent into solitary confinement for three months supposedly because a phone was found on him. I question this and treat [the punishment] as an attempt to put pressure on Sutyagin," Anna Stavitskaya, a lawyer for the scientist, told Interfax.
Sutyagin is serving his sentence in the Arkhangelsk maximum-security penal colony.
"Sutyagin is a very prudent person and he would not have run such a risk, given that the issue of his pardon is being considered," the lawyer said.
Earlier, human rights activists, scientists and prominent Russian public figures had asked the Russian authorities to grant a pardon to Sutyagin, she said.
"We visited him on February 1 and discussed the issue of sending a plea for a pardon through the penal colony's administration. I link the incident to the fact that pressure is being put on him so that he either confess, or drop his appeal to the European Court," the lawyer said.
Sutyagin was put into solitary confinement on February 4, 2007, the lawyer said.
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
[...]
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."
APPEAL
of the representatives of Russian civil society
to:
Chancellor of Austria Wolfgang Schussel
Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair
Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel
Prime Minister of Denmark Anders Fogh Rasmussen
Prime Minister of Spain Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero
Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi
Prime Minister of Latvia Aigars Kalvitis
Prime Minister of Lithuania Algirdas Brazauskas
Prime Minister of Luxembourg Jean Claude Juncker
Prime Minister of the Netherlands Jan Peter Balkenende
Prime Minister of Norway Jens Stoltenberg
President of Poland Lech Kaczynski
President of the United States of America George Bush
Prime Minister of Finland Matti Vanhanen
President of France Jacques Chirac
President of Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus
Prime Minister of Sweden Goran Persson
We, the representatives of Russian human rights organizations, scientific, cultural and political figures, establish with alarm the fact that politically motivated processes going on in Russia obviously point out at the real danger of mass persecutions of dissenters, revival of unlawfulness and suppression of civil rights.
This danger followed President Putin and his KGB-coworkers’ arrival at the highest echelons of power: today these people occupy the majority of the country’s leading positions. It is at the time of their functioning mass politically motivated persecutions became reality, when citizens are charged with state treason, divulgence of State secrets and economic offences on the basis of evidence concocted by the FSB or the Prosecutor’s office. Nowadays there is no more doubt as to the fact of suppression of democratic institutions and repartition of property in Russia, performed by “forces agencies” and courts. Lawyers are also subject to unexampled persecutions and accusations.
Within the past few years, the following persons became victims of far-fetched criminal persecutions: Alexander Nikitin (ecologist), Grigoriy Pasko (journalist), Nikolay Tschur (ecologist), Victor Kalyadin (entrepreneur), Vladimir Soyfer (scientist), Valentin Moiseev (diplomat and scientist), Igor Sutyagi (scientist), Valentin Danilov (scientist), Anatoliy Babkin (scientist), Juriy Khvorostov (scientist), Vladimir Schurov (scientist), Victor Akulichev (scientist), Victor Kovalchuk (inventor), John Tobbin (probationer), Sergey Brovchenko (lawyer), Olga Tsepilova (sociologist), environmental organization “Baykalskaya Volna”, Zara Murtazalieva (student), activists of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), Mikhail Khodorkovskiy (entrepreneur), Platon Lebedev (entrepreneur), Svetlana Bakhmina (lawyer), Mikhail Trepashkin (lawyer), Oscar Kaybyshev (scientist)… Hundreds and thousands of people have fallen victims to unlawful and arbitrary actions of authorities in different regions of Russia, including Bashkiriya and Chechnya. These days, the number of people persecuted for political reasons has amounted to that of the USSR.
In our view, one of the main reasons for escalation of antidemocratic processes in Russia is an inert and inconsistent feedback of the heads of the European countries with regard to mass violations of human rights in Russia.
We invite the heads of the European Union countries, authoritative international organizations as well as human rights community to demand in an open and explicit way that the Russian Federation fulfills every legal and humanitarian obligation assumed by it, including the Helsinki Convention. The issue of observance of human rights in Russia is related to the European security and is as urgent as it was 30 years ago.
At the background of numerous violations of democratic norms and human rights in Russia, particular cruelty and sophistication features processes against scientists Igor Sutyagin and Valentin Danilov, lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin, student Zara Murtazalieva, as well as entrepreneurs Mikhail Khodorkovskiy and Platon Lebedev. All of them were convicted by “pocket” courts, without any legally significant proof of their guilt underlying their conviction.
The main reason for criminal persecution of Mr. Khodorkovskiy and Mr. Lebedev is their open and active support of political and civil opposition. In our view, their arrest, detention and unlawful conviction were accompanied by such circumstances, which are meant to act as the Kremlin’s warning to anyone dissenting from the official opinion.
We are convinced of the fact that Mr. Sutyagin, Mr. Danilov, Mr. Trepashkin, Ms. Murtazalieva, Mr. Khodorkovskiy and Mr. Lebedev’s conviction was politically motivated and is meant as a deterrent regarding the society in general and Russian intelligentsia in particular.
The European Union countries and their heads have adopted a tolerant attitude towards a repressive system established in Russia, omnipotence of special services, judiciary that is dependent upon the executive power and Mr. Putin personally, who is the ideologist of a cruel suppression of the opposition. Such attitude is nurturing new dictators in Europe.
We ask you to facilitate the recognition of Mr. Danilov, Mr. Trepashkin, Ms. Murtazalieva, Mr. Khodorkovskiy and Mr. Lebedev as political prisoners. We invite you to avail yourselves of all powers at your disposal in order to influence President Putin as well as the corresponding structures of the Council of Europe, so that a speedy, impartial and open re-trial of the cases of Mr. Sutyagin, Mr. Danilov, Mr. Trepashkin, Ms. Murtazalieva, Mr. Khodorkovskiy and Mr. Lebedev be ensured.
We hope that democratic governments will do their best to prevent Russia from stumbling into its totalitarian past with a dictatorial regime, which is as dangerous for the country itself as for the international community in general.
Yours sincerely,
Yuriy Afanasyev, President of the Russian State Humanitarian University
Lyudmila Alekseeva, Moscow Helsinki Group
Andrey Babushkin, public charity foundation “For civil rights”
Svetlana Gannushkina, Committee of assistance to refugees “Civil assistance”
Vitaliy Ginzburg, Academician, RAS; Nobel Prize winner
Vladimir Kara-Murza, journalist
Garri Kasparov, United Civil Front, world chess champion
Sergey Kovalev, Human Rights Institute, prisoner of conscience
Grigoriy Pasko, journalist, prisoner of conscience
Lev Ponomarev, All-Russian movement “For human rights”
Yuriy Ryzhov, Academician, RAS; National Prize and President of Russia Prize winner
Vladimir Ryzhkov, Republican Party leader, deputy of the RF State Duma
Yuriy Samodurov, Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center
Aleksey Simonov, Glasnost Defense Foundation
Aleksandr Tkachenko, Russian PEN-center, director general; writer
Lyudmila Ulitskaya, writer
Ernst Cherniy, head of the Ecology and Human Rights Coalition.
Aleksey Yablokov, Academician, RAS; leader of “Green Russia” party, Center for Russian Environmental Policy
Rev. Gleb Yakunin, Public Committee in Defense of Freedom of Conscience
In Khodorkovsky's Prison Kept a Secret
The Moscow Times, Wednesday, October 12, 2005. Issue 3272. Page 1.
By Nabi Abdullaev
[...]
Igor Sutyagin, a former scholar at Moscow's respected USA and Canada Institute who is serving a 15-year prison sentence for espionage, has been told he will be transferred from a high-security prison camp in the Udmurtia region to a prison in the Moscow region, his lawyer Anna Stavitskaya said Tuesday.
"He has gotten accustomed to the environment in the Udmurtia prison, he even produced a newsletter there. I don't know why he has to be transferred now," she said. "Also, the transfer is something extremely fearful."
Stavitskaya said the decision to move Sutyagin could have resulted from the Sept. 20-22 visit to Moscow by Christos Pourgourides, a rapporteur for the Council of Europe. Pourgourides had asked Russian officials why Sutyagin was sent to serve his sentence in Udmurtia and not in the Moscow region, where he was sentenced, or in the Kaluga region, where he lived, Stavitskaya said.
Business Week, May 27, 2005
By Jason Bush
As a Moscow court prepares to hear the Khodorkovsky verdict, his defense team and human rights advocates are seeing red
The reading of the verdict in the fraud and tax evasion trial of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was still continuing on May 26, and is expected to last into next week as Judge Irina Kolesnikova reads through the 1,000-page document. But no one is paying much attention to her words anymore: They repeat the prosecution's original charges against Khodorkovsky almost verbatim, ignoring the various arguments put forward by the defense. Such has been the way throughout the Yukos (YUKOY ) saga, in which Russian courts have consistently taken the side of prosecutors.
Whatever one thinks about Khodorkovsky, or the ethics and legality of his former business activities at the huge oil conglomerate he once commanded, few have any illusions left about the capacity of Russia's justice system to secure a fair trial. Procedural flaws in the case have been documented by, among others, the Council of Europe, the Strasbourg-based international human rights organization of which Russia is also a member. In a January resolution, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe identified "serious procedural violations" that "call into question the fairness, impartiality, and objectivity of the authorities."
ASTRONOMICAL TAX. For example, in defiance of international legal conventions and Russian laws, defense lawyers have had their premises searched and documents relating to the defense confiscated. One of the most controversial steps taken during the investigation was the arrest and detention of Svetlana Bakhmina, 35, a junior Yukos lawyer accused of stealing $650 million from a Yukos subsidiary in the 1990s. Russian media have implied that Bakhmina was arrested simply to put pressure on her superior. The media has quoted police sources who promised to release Bakhmina when her boss, head of the Yukos legal department Dmitry Gololobov, returned to Russia for questioning.
Any belief in the impartiality and independence of Russian courts in the Yukos affair was compromised last year, when successive court decisions repeatedly endorsed the ever-mounting back-tax claims against the oil company. The eventual back-tax bill, $28 billion, exceeds Yukos' revenues during the period, let alone its profits -- well above any conceivable amount on which Yukos could have dodged taxes. Even the justification claimed by prosecutors, that tax havens once considered legal were in fact illegal, don't explain such astronomical sums.
Then there's the case of Alexei Pichugin, Yukos' head of security, who was convicted of murder in March. The prosecution lacked forensic evidence, relying instead on the testimony of a multiple murderer serving a long prison term, defense lawyers said. Pichugin's original trial last year was suspended and the jury dismissed, after five of the jurors mysteriously requested relief from their duties. Defense lawyers and former jurors have alleged that the judge got rid of the original jury because prosecutors knew it would not convict based on the evidence.
JURY OF PEERS? Such accusations are nothing new, say human rights activists and many legal experts, who have highlighted similar cases of questionable convictions. Last year, Valentin Danilov, a physicist, and Igor Sutyagin, a disarmament researcher, were both sentenced to 15 years in prison for espionage and high treason, after convictions for selling their research to foreign partners. Russia's powerful security service, the FSB, declared the information was classified, even though it was available from public sources.
Danilov, accused of selling satellite technology to the Chinese, received an acquittal from a jury in 2003, but had to face a retrial, after Russia's Supreme Court overturned his original acquittal on minor technical grounds. In the Sutyagin trial, both judge and jury were replaced, after the first judge to consider the case refused to try it for lack of evidence. Sutyagin's lawyers claim to have identified at least one member of the FSB among the jury that eventually convicted him.
Of course, not all Russian trials involve the FSB or alleged issues of national security. But at least 97% of criminal cases in Russia end in convictions, showing the very strong influence prosecutors invariably have on the courts. One problem is that, in contrast to Western jurisdictions, higher authorities have huge discretion over appointment of judges, the cases they receive, and even their compensation.
OFFICIAL INTERFERENCE? In Moscow, decisions over which judges get to try which cases are made by the president of the Moscow City Court, Olga Yegorova, who was in turn appointed by presidential decree in 2000. In a letter to President Vladimir Putin in March, Olga Kudeshkina, a former Moscow judge, slammed the resulting lack of judicial independence, claiming that more than 80 Moscow judges had resigned in protest since Yegorova's appointment in 2000.
Kudeshkina, who lost her job last year after complaining about pressure on judges, alleges that Yegorova interferes regularly in court decisions, acting in concert with senior Kremlin officials and prosecutors. "The present judicial system fosters gross violation of citizens' rights. The judiciary is far from being independent," she told the Russian newspaper Gazeta on Mar. 30.
The irony is that, when he first became President in 2000, Vladimir Putin promised to emphasize reform of the judicial system. And during his early years in office, he did take several positive steps in this direction. These included higher pay for judges and funding for courts, the introduction of jury trials, and updated laws, including a new code on criminal procedure and civil code.
Yet all these steps forward have now been overshadowed by the Yukos affair, which has shown that judicial independence and impartial application of the law are as far away for Russia as ever.
Institutions, Restoration, and Revolution
By Leon Aron
Posted: Friday, April 15, 2005
RUSSIAN OUTLOOK
AEI Online
Publication Date: April 15, 2005
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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)
By Masha Lipman
The Washington Post, Tuesday, January 18, 2005; Page A17
MOSCOW -- The term "soft authoritarianism" has replaced "managed democracy" in describing Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime. Even Putin's defenders have reservations about calling Russia a democracy anymore. They usually explain that Russia's very special circumstances require a very special kind of democracy. Putin himself reportedly talked about "Russian-style democracy" in responding to President Bush's concerns about recent political developments here (concerns expressed when the two presidents met in Chile in November).
The current Russian-style democracy is very special indeed. Political competition has been eliminated, checks and balances done away with, and the public effectively alienated from its government. In fact, the Kremlin has no longer maintained even the appearance of democracy since Putin canceled gubernatorial elections and switched to a system of governors of his own choice. Today the important question about Putin's regime is whether the "softness" of his style of rule will last or whether things will gradually get harder.
Apart from the campaign against the Yukos oil enterprise and its executives, Putin has been sparing with repression. His menacing tone, threats of prosecution, the ever-increasing number of state security service people in government positions and, of course, the example of Yukos proved to be enough to intimidate the elites and cleanse the political scene of significant opposition.
But lately there have been alarming signs that the regime may be slipping toward harder methods. Several more people -- medium-rank executives or lawyers -- were arrested in the Yukos case late last year. (Two of them are women; one, who has two small children, is in jail, while the other was released only because she developed a serious medical condition, and she remains under travel restrictions.)
Academics Igor Sutyagin and Valentin Danilov received long prison sentences on trumped-up charges of espionage.
And members of a radical political youth group were sentenced to five years for breaking into a government building and smashing several pieces of furniture. Other members of the same group committed a similar action and have been charged with a state crime (violent seizure of power) that could bring them 20 years in prison.
These cases have little in common. The recent Yukos arrests seem to have been provoked by the exasperation of prosecutors unable to conclude the campaign against the jailed former head of the firm, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the company itself. The Yukos case has dragged on much longer than the Kremlin expected, and the cost to Russia's economy and international prestige has been enormous.
According to the lawyers in the cases of Sutyagin and Danilov, the academics were tried by specially selected juries. Danilov's case is especially outrageous, because he was acquitted and then retried by a new jury. Their harsh sentences (15 and 14 years, respectively) are a message from the state security service, anxious to show who's boss.
Severe punishments for radical young activists came in time for the "orange revolution" in Ukraine and probably are prompted by the fears of Kremlin rulers that their power might be challenged by angry crowds.
As the regime in Russia has shut out political competition, Kremlin aides have increasingly resorted to oversimplified and inefficient methods of governing. When these primitive attempts at solutions lead to failure and crisis, Putin and his aides, instead of rethinking their policies, give in to frustration and fury.
The destruction of Yukos, the heavy-handed interference by the state in the economy and the disastrous Ukraine policy are repelling investors, neighbors and foreign partners. Putin's executives are unable to win respect on the world scene or to ensure steady economic development at home -- but they can put their domestic enemies in jail. And as failures accumulate, the urge to blame it on "hostile forces" grows stronger, as does the desire to punish the "enemy."
Putin has not meant to be a repressive leader. Even though some among his aides may be more vengeful and hawkish than others, his regime mostly rests on corrupt bureaucrats who are unlikely to unleash mass repression because they realize that they could in turn fall victim to it. What causes alarm is the increasing tendency to turn to arrests, jailings and severe sentences.
Those arrested in the Yukos case, the young radicals and the academic "spies" cannot be described as a political opposition in the strict sense of the word. Rather, they fell victim to the Russian ruling elite's hatred, its desire for revenge or its fears. The jailing of political opponents, while common enough now in Belarus and the countries of Central Asia, has not become accepted practice in Russia; for the most part, the Kremlin's intolerance of public critics has been limited to verbal threats. But the risk of slipping into an ugly repressive cycle is growing, and it no longer seems improbable that we'll see people arrested and imprisoned for voicing dissent or engaging in peaceful political protest.
Masha Lipman, editor of the Carnegie Moscow Center's Pro et Contra journal, writes a monthly column for The Post.
