RUSSIA: Environmentalist Indicted for Treason

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrei Ivanov

MOSCOW, Oct 3 1996 (IPS) - The Russian federal security service (FSB), has formally indicted former Soviet submarine captain turned environmental activist Alexandr Nikitin of treason — a charge that carries a maximum sentence of death.

Nikitin, a former naval officer, had been working with the Norwegian environmental group, the Bellona Foundation, compiling a report on radioactive wastes in the Arctic.

The specific charges laid against him Wednesday were espionage under Article 64 of the Criminal Code, disclosure of state secrets, under Article 75, and use of a false document. The FSB, successor to the feared KGB of Soviet days, has accused Nikitin of collecting classified information and passing it to Bellona.

An FSB official said Nikitin did not hand in his officer’s pass after he retired in 1992 and had used it to visit one of St Petersburg’s military units, where he examined documents classified as secret and top secret.

Nikitin allegedly copied excerpts from the documents and used them in the report he co-authored with Thomas Nilsen and Igor Kudrik of Bellona called The Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive contamination.

According to Nikitin’s lawyer, Yuri Schmidt, the FSB is violating the Russian Constitution because the charges are based on a secret, unpublished Ministry of Defence decree of 1993 which neither he nor Nikitin has access to. The Constitution states that no-one can be charged under legal acts which have not been published.

Moreover, the Russian Supreme Court had earlier ruled that Nikitin should be regarded as a civilian.

Nikitin has been held in prison in solitary confinement since 6 February following his arrest prompted by the preliminary publication in November of part of the Bellona report and an investigation by the FSB.

Bellona first faced problems in Russia last October when the FSB confiscated their files at an office in the northern city of Murmansk on suspicion that they contained secret data on the Northern fleet.

The files were sent for examination to the main headquarters of the Russian Navy where experts ruled that a considerable part of the files contained “materials belonging to the category of state secrets”.

However neither the FSB nor Nikitin were satisfied with this report and two more expert commissions were set up — one from the Ministry of Shipbuilding and one from the Ministry of Atomic Energy (MinAtom).

The key areas of the Bellona report on which the charges are based are chapter eight on nuclear submarine accidents and chapter two, section three on submarine reactor safety.

The Ministry of Shipbuilding Commission said it was not competent to judge whether this information could be considered a state secret. MinAtom’s commission gave a similar response with respect to chapter eight and ruled that the information on reactor safety could not be considered as a state secret.

The FSB, nevertheless, pursued the charges referring back to the naval Expert Committee and to their own committee on ecology.

This committee had ruled that information on submarine accidents and reactor safety had no relevance for ecology — the Russian Constitution states that withholding information relevant to environmental safety is illegal.

“This is patently absurd,” Hakom Strand of Bellona told IPS by phone Thursday. “There is absolutely no doubt that both nuclear submarine accidents and reactor safety are vitally important to ecological safety.”

Although the charges against Nikitin could lead to 15 years in prison, or even the death sentence, neither he nor his lawyer are pessimistic about the eventual outcome. “Now we know our report is the only basis for the charges and also know which sections it is clear that the accusation have very little substance,” says Strand.

Nikitin is refusing to confirm that the investigation is over until he gets access to the Defence Ministry decree on which the case is based.

Schmidt is now going to re examine the 5,000 pages of evidence which have been generated in the course of the investigation. This is no mean task as they are not presented in any systematic way.

In the meantime, international support for Nikitin is mounting. Two French lawyers from the Paris-based International Federation for the Rights of Man (FILDH) are due to arrive in St Petersburg Friday to start their own investigation into human rights violations in the case.

The Helsinki Committee is also sending a group of observers comprising lawyers and human rights activists. In addition the Council of Europe’s Committee on Judicial and Human Rights Issues has set up a special group to study the case and prepare a report.