| Intelligence agencies are against juries trying espionage cases Russian intelligence services are opposed to having the results of their work evaluated by juries. Sources of the Vremya Novostei newspaper claim that in the near future, employees of the Federal Security Service will take the initiative to abolish the participation of juries in cases within their competence. The FSB believes that people who have not passed a special check should not be allowed to consider cases involving crimes against the state, at least under Articles 275 and 276 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“high treason” and “espionage”). According to the newspaper Vremya Novostey, the FSB, through deputies and security officials, will soon introduce draft amendments to Article 31 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
This position was recently voiced by Valery Zazhitsky, a professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure at the FSB Academy, Doctor of Legal Sciences. “I proceed from the general position that juries cannot provide a guarantee of non-disclosure of state secrets,” he said. - The non-disclosure agreement they give cannot be considered a sufficiently reliable guarantee. In a traditional court, such cases are handled by persons who have access to state secrets. And according to the law, they all undergo appropriate testing.” Mr. Zazhitsky also added that the jury cannot be held criminally liable for violating the subscription, since they “are neither on duty nor at work.”
But it is quite possible that intelligence agencies are fighting to reject juries for other reasons. The recent defeat of the FSB in the trial of Krasnoyarsk Technical University researcher Valentin Danilov, who was accused of spying for China, was a very painful blow for counterintelligence officers. Let us recall that Mr. Danilov’s colleagues and defense argued that all of his work for the All-China Precision Engineering Import-Export Company was carried out on the basis of open materials and that the classification of secrecy from the scientist’s research was lifted back in 1992. The FSB officers did not believe this, but the jury felt that the investigation did not prove the physicist’s guilt, and on December 29 last year they acquitted him of all charges.
The security officers and prosecutors, not accustomed to such an outcome, realized that a similar result could await them in other espionage cases. Leaving aside questions of the guilt of the defendants, we note that lawyers could not help but notice obvious blunders in the investigative materials, for example, in the case of Igor Sutyagin, head of the sector of military-technical and military-economic policy of the Institute of the USA and Canada of the Russian Academy of Sciences. According to the prosecution, he sold materials about the Russian army abroad. At the same time, the FSB practically does not dispute that Sutyagin prepared his articles, among other things, on the basis of materials published in open sources, introducing his “recruiters” to articles published in the Washington Post, the British reference book “Military Balance”, and in “Red Star” , in the “Sea Collection”, etc. Even the Kaluga Regional Court, which previously considered this case, came to the conclusion that “the wording of the charges... is so vague that it is completely unclear what information the investigation implies.” Now Sutyagin's case will be considered by a jury. True, recently in this trial, Moscow City Court Judge Pyotr Shtunder, who has experience working with juries, was replaced by Judge Marina Komarova, who was in charge of the case of another “spy” - Valentin Moiseev. But this, naturally, cannot guarantee a successful outcome for the special services.
Ideally, law enforcement agencies would generally like to limit the competence of juries as much as possible. The general attitude towards “representatives of the people” was very colorfully described by prosecutor Boris Loktionov, who was unable to prove in court the guilt of Andrei Semiletnikov, deputy editor-in-chief of the far-right magazine “Russian Host”, who was accused of organizing the pogrom of the market in Yasenevo. Leaving the courtroom last week, he said that "housewives and engineers should not judge the work of the investigation." The prosecutor's reaction is understandable - according to statistics, in ordinary Russian courts the share of acquittals last year was only 0.8%, and in jury trials - 15%.
At the same time, prosecutors, police officers, and security officers usually give similar arguments: pressure can be put on jurors because they are not protected like judges, the procedure for forming a panel is imperfect, the Supreme Court overturns about a third of acquittals, the proportion of cases worldwide is declining, considered by the jury.
In principle, human rights activists have a counterargument to each of these accusations, but in a dispute with government officials they pay attention to the most important thing. “A jury trial is a wonderful counterbalance to state arbitrariness, and in our conditions it is the most effective guarantee against corruption, against a dependent court,” former deputy chairman of the Constitutional Court Tamara Morshchakova said in an interview with a correspondent of the Vremya Novostei newspaper. “This is the only source of control for a society that does not trust the courts.” “In the theory of law, the court is that branch of government where the state consciously engages in self-restraint, which is expressed, among other things, in the participation of the people in the administration of justice. And the stronger this restriction, the more independent justice is,” echoes Sergei Pashin, a former judge and professor at the Department of Criminal Procedure at the Moscow Institute of Economics, Politics and Law.
Ms. Morshchakova believes that in fact, now, under the guise of protecting state secrets, an attack on the jury is beginning, “which does not fit into the general system of activity of our law enforcement agencies, which are not accustomed to being told “no.” Something similar already happened in Russia more than a hundred years ago. At the end of the 19th century, Chief Prosecutor Pobedonostsev asked Alexander III to abolish the jury trial, as “completely unnecessary, completely incompatible with the conditions of our life.” As a result, the competence of the jury was significantly curtailed, and in 1878, the consideration of cases of state and especially dangerous crimes was transferred to military courts. And today, Russian security forces almost openly appeal to historical experience, nodding to their predecessors. Forgetting, apparently, that even in tsarist times that period in Russian history was called the era of counter-reforms. Sergey GROMOV |
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