By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — One of the ugliest attacks on human rights in recent Russian history took an ominous turn on June 10, when imprisoned anti-nuclear campaigner Alexander Nikitin was denied bail, and his trial was handed over from a civilian to a military court.
Nikitin, a former naval captain, has been held in a St Petersburg jail on espionage charges since being arrested on February 6 by the Federal Security Service (FSB — the former KGB). He faces a minimum 10-year sentence, and a maximum penalty of death.
Neither Nikitin nor his lawyer, well-known civil liberties advocate Yury Schmidt, was allowed to attend the June 10 hearing, which took the form of a closed-door submission by an FSB prosecutor to a civilian judge.
As a researcher for the Norwegian environmental group Bellona Foundation, Nikitin helped prepare a report on radioactive contamination of the environment by the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet. Naval authorities allege that Nikitin divulged secret information to Bellona.
However, the jailed activist and his supporters insist that all the information contained in the report was freely available from non-classified sources. Bellona's report, which was eventually released on April 19, painted a horrifying picture of neglect by the Northern Fleet of nuclear waste security.
According to a Bellona spokesperson in Oslo, the FSB wants a military trial for Nikitin because the court will be closed, and the security authorities will have more control over Schmidt's conduct of the defence. Addressing these issues in an interview published by the Moscow daily Izvestia on June 8, Schmidt charged that the way was being prepared for gross violations of his client's rights.
Schmidt argued that the FSB's demand for a military trial contravened a ruling by the Constitutional Court, Russia's highest legal authority. In a decision handed down on March 27, the Constitutional Court found that people charged with espionage had the right to be defended by counsel of their choice, instead of lawyers appointed by the FSB. If Nikitin is tried in a military court, the possibility of a normal defence will be sharply limited.
The question whether the trial takes place in a closed court may be crucial if, as Schmidt expects, the FSB prosecutes the case in a highly improper fashion. The navy experts who prepared materials for the prosecution did so, Schmidt told Izvestia, not on the basis of the Russian constitution or the recently adopted Law on State Secrets, but of "old orders from the defence minister which contradict the constitution and the law".
The basis of the charges against Nikitin, Schmidt continued, lay in events from 30 to 35 years back. But the Law on State Secrets states that the maximum length of time for which material can be classified as secret is 30 years.
Meanwhile, one document cited by the navy experts as containing "top secret information" proved to be an abridged version of an Izvestia article from March 1995. Bellona activists say that attempts to submit their sources as evidence in the investigation have been rejected.
In sum, Schmidt told Izvestia, the only "secret" he had encountered in the case was the passionate wish of the armed forces to hide the catastrophic situation in the area of nuclear safety, compounded by the desire of the FSB to prove its usefulness.
The desperate blundering of the military and security authorities should not, of course, lead one to underestimate their seriousness in wanting to rid the country of environmental whistle-blowers. Izvestia on June 8 also carried a report of a conversation between one of the paper's journalists and a St Petersburg FSB investigator working on the Nikitin case. The FSB agent, who asked not to be named, said that further charges might be brought against Nikitin, and also against other individuals.