Russian security trials: In your court

A Supreme Court decision raises concerns about security trials in Russia

IS IT spying if what you tell foreigners is common knowledge? Valentin Danilov, a physicist in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, passed information about the effects of solar activity on satellites to a Chinese firm for which he was doing contract work. At his trial for espionage, several scientists signed a statement swearing that the material he supplied had not been secret since 1992. At the end of last year, a jury duly acquitted him. But this week Russia's Supreme Court overturned the verdict on a technicality, sending the case back for retrial. Whether the court was yielding to pressure or, as it says, upholding prosecutors complaints about procedural violations, is unknown. But Valentin Gefter, director of the Human Rights Institute in Moscow, says that “the likeliest result is not a happy one [for Mr Danilov], because they'll now go back to Krasnoyarsk and try to pressure the jury harder.”

Mr Danilov's was the first espionage case to be tried under Russia's relatively new jury system. In judge-only trials the conviction rate is over 99%; in jury cases it has been 80-85%. Shortly before Mr Danilov was declared not guilty, another scientist, Igor Sutyagin, began a jury trial on charges of treason; his defence was that the material he supplied to a British firm was based on press clippings.

Mr Danilov's acquittal raised hopes that Mr Sutyagin would get a fair hearing. But it also made the FSB, Russia's security agency, realise that juries are harder to sway than judges. In February, a bill was presented to parliament to make espionage and treason cases ineligible for jury trial. Mr Sutyagin's original judge and jury were replaced and, in April, after a trial that his lawyers said was full of irregularities, he was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in jail. The judge, in her instructions to the jury, skirted questions on whether his material had been secret and told them just to make up their minds whether he had passed information to foreign contacts - which he did not deny.

One problem is the incompetence of prosecutors. Mr Sutyagin's case first went before a judge in 2000, who ruled that the FSB's case was too badly formulated to stand trial, but allowed the agency another go. Judges in other cases, trapped between commitment to the law and fear of the security services, have done the same. After one case in the late 1990s, the Supreme Court restricted judges' ability to send cases back and ordered the abolition of the notorious “Decree 55” defining state secrets, whose content was itself secret.

But another problem is that the law remains vague. Even after Decree 55 was abolished, says a report by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, it was invoked in the trial of a journalist, Grigory Pasko. And unluckily for Mr Sutyagin, “treason” could in theory be defined as providing any information that a foreign power used against Russia, even if it were not secret. What is worse, court judgments in Russia do not set binding precedents.

Still, the Supreme Court carries weight. Mr Sutyagin is appealing against his conviction on procedural grounds. If he wins, says Mr Gefter, that could be a warning to the Krasnoyarsk court to play fair with Mr Danilov when he comes before it again.

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