Translated material
"He annoys them"
For the first time, a Russian lawyer has been brought to criminal responsibility for disclosing state secrets
For the first time in Russian practice, a lawyer is being held criminally liable for disclosing information containing state secrets in connection with his defense of his client.Yesterday, the Tverskoy District Court of the capital, at the request of the city prosecutor's office, recognized the presence in the actions of the famous lawyer Boris Kuznetsov (pictured) of signs of a crime under this article of the Criminal Code. In particular, it was said that the lawyer representing the interests of ex-senator Levon Chakhmakhchyan copied a certain secret certificate from his criminal case, and then sent it along with other documents to the Constitutional Court.
If the decision of the Tverskoy Court comes into force, a criminal case will most likely be opened against Mr. Kuznetsov, and he himself will be deprived of his lawyer status. The well-known lawyer himself could not come to the court hearing yesterday, citing illness, but his representatives called the decision “revenge of the special services for his professional activities.”
The reason for the scandal and trial was a certificate classified as “secret” contained in the materials of the case of Mr. Chakhmakhchyan, accused of fraud . In this document, with the sanction of a Supreme Court judge, as part of the verification of operational information about the extortion of $1.5 million by the ex-senator, the management of the Transaero airline was given the right to wiretap the senator’s telephone conversations. Lawyer Kuznetsov photographed this document and sent it along with the complaint to the Constitutional Court. According to the defense lawyer, this certificate was evidence of a gross violation by FSB officers of the Constitution and other laws.
“According to the law, a member of the Federation Council and his property are subject to immunity. At that time, no one deprived him of this right. The operatives did not have the right to wiretap the senator, and the judge did not have the right to give the go-ahead for such actions,” Boris Kuznetsov told Vremya Novostey then . Mr. Kuznetsov was very surprised that the prosecutor’s office found signs of a criminal offense in his actions: “Firstly, I sent this paper to the Constitutional Court only after the prosecutor’s office itself declassified it, so that it could appear in the case as evidence. Secondly, it cannot be secret by definition, because according to the law, information about facts of violation of human rights and freedoms and violations of the rule of law by government bodies is not subject to classification. Thirdly, I ultimately handed over this certificate not to the CIA, but to our Russian Constitutional Court. Then, together with me, it is necessary to punish the employees of the prosecutor’s office who sent the case with a secret certificate to the ordinary Tverskoy court, where there is no office for secret proceedings.”
Mr. Kuznetsov, together with his lawyer Robert Zinoviev, presented these and other arguments yesterday in the Tverskoy court. However, the court, according to the defense, did not listen to them and made a “deliberately unfounded decision.” “First of all, we were not allowed to prepare for the case. The material from the prosecutor's office audit takes 79 pages. The judge allowed us to familiarize ourselves with it only during a break during the trial. Secondly, the conclusion on the secrecy of the certificate was drawn up by FSB officers, who, in fact, in our opinion, bugged the senator in violation of the law,” noted Mr. Zinoviev. In addition, in his opinion, representatives of the prosecutor’s office were unable to answer, and the judge did not take this into account when deciding what exactly were the harmful consequences of the activities of lawyer Kuznetsov.
“The law says that state secrets include those information, the dissemination of which could harm the security of the Russian Federation,” Mr. Zinoviev was perplexed. “At the same time, the judge said that all Kuznetsov’s arguments will be verified during the preliminary investigation.” According to the lawyer, in the near future they will send a complaint against the decision of the Tverskoy Court to the Moscow City Court, but they strongly doubt that it will be overturned. “The active position of Kuznetsov, who works on cases that are “accompanied” by the FSB, irritates them. In this way, the special services are trying to unsettle a competent specialist and are taking revenge. Boris Avraamovich is very worried, which could not but affect his health, he fell ill,” noted Mr. Zinoviev.
For disclosing state secrets without serious consequences, Russian law provides for imprisonment for up to four years.
Accused lawyers
In the modern history of Russia there are many criminal cases against lawyers. One of the relatively long-standing, but large ones is the criminal prosecution of lawyer and human rights activist Sergei Brovchenko , which ended with a briefcase containing four and a half kilograms of cocaine being found in his car in May 1997. Later, information appeared that the bag of drugs had traces of a characteristic tag, which indicated that the drugs had previously been evidence in another case. But Brovchenko was sentenced to nine years in prison. He was released only in January 2004, after serving six and a half years. The Savyolovsky Court of Moscow decided to change his preventive measure to a written undertaking not to leave the place.
The criminal case against lawyer Robert Zinoviev began with the fact that the Presnensky District Court of Moscow in November 2004 found his client Evgeniy Yankovsky guilty of theft of 1 billion rubles. and sentenced him to eight years in a general regime colony. Both the defendant and the lawyer were confident that the court was biased. After Mr. Zinoviev's final speech, Judge Elena Litvinenko contacted the prosecutor's office with a request to initiate criminal proceedings against the lawyer for libel. Six months later, the Presnensky Interdistrict Prosecutor's Office of Moscow dropped the case for lack of evidence of a crime.
On May 19, 2004, the Moscow District Military Court convicted former FSB lieutenant colonel Mikhail Trepashkin , who was engaged in private law practice after his dismissal from the special services, one of the participants in the scandalous press conference, when in 1998 a group of FSB officers accused the leadership of their department of organizing contract killings. Mikhail Trepashkin was sentenced to four years in prison for disclosing state secrets. According to the prosecution, while serving in the KGB of the USSR and the FSB of the Russian Federation from 1984 to 1997, Trepashkin copied official documents, which he later illegally kept at home. During the search, investigative materials from the KGB of the USSR, the Ministry of Security of the Russian Federation, the FSK and the FSB were confiscated from him in written form and on floppy disks.
In January 2005, the Basmanny Court authorized the initiation of a criminal case against Pavel Ivlev , a lawyer for the ALM-Feldmans law firm that served YUKOS. The Prosecutor General's Office suspected the lawyer of embezzling $2.4 billion belonging to Yukos, laundering $810 million and tax evasion. In mid-February of the same year, the Moscow City Court upheld the complaint of Ivlev’s defense, not finding any corpus delicti in his actions.
In March 2005, the Moscow prosecutor's office opened a criminal case against lawyer Viktor Parshutkin "based on the results of an investigation" under the article "obstruction of justice" of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. According to the prosecutor's office, Mr. Parshutkin organized a series of publications on the case of his client, entrepreneur Igor Poddubny, and was in contact with the jurors on the merits of the case. The criminal case was dropped in February 2006.