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Boston Globe
June 26, 2002
Russian journalist's conviction stands
Rights advocates decry decision
By David Filipov, Globe Staff
MOSCOW - Russia's Supreme Court yesterday upheld the treason conviction of a military journalist who reported on the navy's dumping of nuclear waste, in a decision environmentalists and free-speech advocates portrayed as a defeat for basic freedoms in post-Soviet Russia.
Grigory Pasko will be sent to a penal colony after the court left in place his sentence of four years of hard labor for taking notes at a meeting of Russian naval commanders and intending to pass the notes to Japanese reporters. A military court in December found Pasko guilty of the offenses, which were based on classified military decrees that have since been invalidated by the Supreme Court.
Pasko, his lawyers, and rights advocates in Russia and the West have maintained that he divulged no secrets and that the state's case is retaliation for his reports uncovering alleged environmental abuses by Russia's Pacific Fleet, such as dumping of radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan. The trial provides what rights advocates say is an unflattering glimpse at how far Russia's justice system has to go before it is clear of the politically motivated trials that characterized the Soviet era.
President Vladimir V. Putin has vowed to uphold the rights set out by Russia's 1993 Constitution. But Pasko's supporters and others say the democratic changes will only be superficial as long as the judiciary is vulnerable to pressure from the military and the security services that succeeded the KGB. They say that the Soviet practice of presumption of guilt continues, even though the country's post-Communist legal system proclaims presumption of innocence.
''When the authorities decide that they are going to convict you of something, there is absolutely no way to win,'' said Charles Digges of Bellona, a Norway-based environmental organization that has championed Pasko's cause.
Pasko was charged with treason in 1997. He was acquitted in 1999 after spending nearly a year and a half in jail, but was convicted of the lesser offense of abusing office.
Pasko's lawyers appealed the conviction. But in December, a military court in Vladivostok found Pasko guilty on two of the treason charges, basing its decision on a 1996 Defense Ministry document that listed what the ministry considered to be state secrets.
The list of secrets was classified, so that no defendant could ever know whether he was passing on classified information. Russia's security services had tried to use the same decree to convict a former Navy captain, Alexander Nikitin, of treason. Nikitin's acquittal in 1999 by a civilian court, a decision the Supreme Court upheld in 2000, was the first time the former KGB had lost such a case.
Last month, a Supreme Court appeals board invalidated the Defense Ministry orders used to convict Pasko, which forbade servicemen and others with access to state secrets from contacting foreigners when off duty and which made certain information relating to the armed services classified. But the court said the orders remained valid in Pasko's conviction.
Since his conviction in December, Pasko has been in a holding cell in Vladivostok awaiting yesterday's appeal. Supporters gathered outside the Supreme Court building in Moscow yesterday, carrying signs reading ''Freedom for Pasko'' and ''You are not alone.''
Sergei Yushenkov, a member of the federal parliament, said the Pasko case is the most ''shameful page'' in the history of not only the Federal Security Service, the main KGB successor, but also of the Russian state.
''There is no justice in our country,'' he said. ''Pasko has been chosen as a sort of symbol, as a signal to society, that `you journalists, do not forget that you must serve the state.'''
Digges saw as payback the guilty verdict in the trial of Pasko, who as an active serviceman was tried by military courts and a military collegiate of the Supreme Court.
''He was convicted of perhaps having the intention of passing notes to Japanese journalists, which he never actually did,'' he said. ''He was convicted for maybe having the thought in his head for maybe passing along notes which maybe contained something secret.''
Pasko has maintained he was only reporting on the environmental effects of nuclear-fuel dumping. The Constitution makes it illegal to classify information about the environment. The post-Communist article reflected concern in the early 1990s about the mess the Soviet Union left behind in its effort to maintain military parity with the United States.
The environmental problems have not gone away, but Putin's administration has disbanded important environmental agencies and accused nongovernmental organizations of being infiltrated by foreign spies.
Pasko was retried against the background of a spate of cases brought by the domestic security agency against ecologists and researchers after Putin, a former intelligence chief, became head of state.
Mariana Katzarova of Amnesty International, which deemed Pasko one of its ''prisoners of conscience'' in January, said authorities had decided in advance to convict an innocent man.
''Obviously the decision has been made somewhere else and before this court convened,'' Katzarova said. ''They pretty much decided to go ahead with the case, to ignore the violations. How could we even speak of any independence of thoughts or any independence of the process of justice?''
Anatoly Pyshkin, a lawyer for Pasko, said he would appeal the latest decision to higher bodies at the Supreme Court, but such appeals rarely result in acquittals.
Globe researcher Anastasia Sashchikhina contributed to this report. Material from the Associated Press was also used.
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