News: March 2006 Archives

In the 2005 Report on Human Rights Practices, released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor of the U.S. State Department on March 8, 2006, the case of Igor Sutyagin is mentioned as an example of politically motivated prosecution:

In August [2004] the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Igor Sutyagin, a disarmament researcher with the US and Canada Institute, against his conviction for espionage related charges. 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. In April 2004 a Moscow city court found Sutyagin guilty and sentenced him to 14 years in a maximum security facility (the sentence included time served since his arrest in October 1999). Sutyagin claimed the decision was unjust and insisted that he had no access to confidential information. Some observers agreed that he had no access to classified information and described the severe sentence as an effort to discourage citizens from sharing sensitive information with professional colleagues from other countries. Russian government officials asserted that Sutyagin had wittingly or unwittingly entered into a paid arrangement with a foreign intelligence service. Because of the conduct of the trial and lengthy sentence, a number of domestic and international human rights NGOs raised concerns that the charges were politically motivated. At year's end Sutyagin was allegedly in a penal facility in Arkhangelsk Oblast and his attorneys were reportedly appealing the move.