News: March 2005 Archives

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