Introduction

Alexander Nikitin was born on May 16, 1952 in Ukraine. After graduating in 1974 from the Naval Engineering College in the faculty of engineering in Sevastopol, Crimea, Nikitin reached the rank of first captain in the Russian Navy as chief engineer of a nuclear submarine. From 1987 to 1992, Nikitin worked as a safety inspector of nuclear reactors in Moscow. In 1994, Nikitin went to work as an environmental researcher for the Bellona Foundation, a Norwegian environmental organization in St. Petersburg. Nikitin utilized his expertise in the field of nuclear safety in his work for Bellona, and co-authored a controversial report in 1996 that would dramatically change the course of his life.

The Bellona Foundation

The Environmental Foundation Bellona was founded in 1986 by Frederic Hauge, Rune Haaland and other Norwegian environmentalists who saw the need for a new environmental organization in Norway. The founders of Bellona aimed to document and combat environmental culprits through professional investigation and non-violent actions. Bellona soon became the leading environmental group in Norway, and currently employs more than twenty experts in the fields of nuclear physics, chemistry, biology, economics, law and social studies. Charting the environmental hazards in northwestern Russia is now one of the main focuses of Bellona's work because of the potential effects on Norway's environment.

As part of its campaign to expose the radioactive contamination caused by the Russian Northern Fleet, Bellona compiled information gathered over years of research and the collaboration of experts such as Nikitin to publish a comprehensive report in 1996, The Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive Contamination. The report reveals in shocking detail the ruinous condition of the Northern Fleet, in which 18% of the world's existing nuclear reactors are situated, and the dangerous storage facilities of nuclear waste threatening the ecology of the Arctic Ocean. All of the information for the report was gathered from open, previously published, or otherwise unclassified sources.

Nikitin's Arrest and Pre-Trial Detention

Even though the Russian Constitution prohibits classifying information on environmental issues as secret, the FSB (successor to the Soviet security apparatus, KGB) interfered significantly with the research and publication of the report. On October 5, 1995, FSB agents ransacked Bellona's office in Murmansk and the homes of several employees, confiscating all of their background materials for the report. On the same day, the FSB also confiscated Nikitin's passport. Nikitin was arrested in St. Petersburg on February 6, 1996 and charged with high treason in the form of espionage under Article 64 (a) of the Russian Penal Code, and served ten months of pre-trial detention. After his release, Nikitin won the prestigious Goldman Award in recognition of his courageous contribution to the Bellona report.

According to a statement issued by the FSB after Nikitin's arrest, their preliminary investigation concluded that Nikitin cooperated with and accepted payments from Bellona, using his contacts in the Russian Navy to assemble "secret and top secret data" regarding the Navy's nuclear powered submarine fleet.

Human Rights Violations and Illegal Charges

From the very beginning of his ordeal, Nikitin has been denied the right of due process, and the charges against him violate principles established by the Russian Constitution and internationally accepted norms of human rights, including the European Convention on Human Rights, which Russia has signed.

Invoking Soviet-era secrecy laws, the FSB originally insisted that Nikitin could only be represented in a security case by attorneys approved by the FSB. Traditionally, those attorneys answered to the KGB and helped pressure their "clients" into guilty pleas. Nikitin, backed by his employer, The Bellona Foundation, successfully petitioned the Constitutional Court of Russia to grant him his right to choose his own attorneys.

In the two and a half years since his arrest, Nikitin has received seven sets of charges, including treason, all based on secret or unpublished military decrees and laws enacted after his arrest. The charges are all based on the assumption that Nikitin handed over state secrets to the Bellona Foundation during his work on the report. The FSB cited Defense Ministry Decree 55:96 in order to support their charges, even though the decree was introduced in August 1996, eleven months after Nikitin allegedly completed the "criminal activity." This not only violates international standards of human rights and criminal procedure, but also directly violates Article 54 of the Russian Constitution that states, "The law instituting or aggravating the liability of a person shall have no retroactive force."

Nikitin's right to a fair and equal trial has also been violated. Defense Ministry Decree 55:96 is a secret document that has not been made available to Nikitin or his attorneys, and therefore violates of Article 15 of the Russian Constitution that states, "No normative legal act affecting the rights, liberties or duties of the human being and citizen may apply unless it has been published officially for general knowledge." The secrecy of the decree makes it nearly impossible for Nikitin's lawyers to construct a proper defense, and the trial can not be considered fair. Employing secret decrees also violates Article 6 of the European Human Rights Convention (ECHR) guaranteeing a fair trial, and Article 123 of the Russian Constitution, which guarantees a fair trial with both the prosecution and the defense having an equal chance to present their positions in court.

Another violation of Nikitin's rights relates to his prolonged pre-trial detention. The European Human Rights Convention guarantees that a person taken into custody on the suspicion of having committed a penal offence is entitled to a "prompt" legal review of the case and grounds for imprisonment. The Russian Constitution sets the time limit for this review at 48 hours, but Nikitin was held for more than ten months with no judicial review of the grounds for his imprisonment. Furthermore, the public procurator is the only official who can establish the legality of imprisoning an individual according to the Russian criminal procedural code, but Nikitin's case was reviewed by a military court, which had no authority over the matter. However, the public procurator also has supreme responsibility for investigation of criminal cases, and is therefore not be able to make an independent assessment of the legal grounds for imprisonment.

Nikitin's right to have the case against him settled "within a reasonable time," according to Article 6 of the ECHR, has also been violated. Article 47 of the Russian Constitution guarantees everyone charged with a crime the right to have the case reviewed by a court of law. Nikitin has been under official investigation since October 1995 when his passport was confiscated. Additional investigations of the case were concluded on September 17, 1997, but the case has still not been brought to trial.

On May 8, 1998 the FSB leveled its seventh indictment against Nikitin. The charges came after Nikitin's lawyers filed a petition with the General Procurator on March 20, 1998, demanding that the unconstitutional charges be dismissed. In a letter dated April 20, 1998, Deputy Procurator General A.A. Rozanov appeared to agree and instructed the Chief Procurator in St. Petersburg to remove such charges from the case. However, Rozanov maintained there was evidence that Nikitin had disclosed information from secret sources and, therefore, the charges of high treason and disclosure of state secrets "are sustainable." The FSB filed the seventh set of charges in accordance with this order, but the change was only cosmetic. The new indictment is identical word for word to the charges filed on February 24, 1998, apart from the removal of the references to the constitutionally impermissible decrees.

Nikitin's attorneys stress that the new charges are still based on the same secret or retroactive decrees without reference thereto. The charges are not based on any public decrees in effect at the time Nikitin's alleged conduct took place in 1995. Therefore, as Nikitin's attorneys point out, the previous charges based on unconstitutional laws are now based on no laws at all.

Harassment by the FSB

The FSB recently escalated its harassment of Nikitin and his attorneys shortly after Nikitin's attorneys filed the petition in March. Nikitin first noticed he was being followed by FSB agents on May1, when he left his home in northeast St. Petersburg to attend a party near St Isaac's square. Nikitin left his car parked outside for one hour, and returned to find one of the tires slashed. Nikitin's tires have been slashed on two other occasions, he has found glue in the locks of his car, FSB agents are constantly parked outside his home, and the telephone rings constantly in the middle of the night.

One of Nikitin's attorneys, Ivan Pavlov, was physically harassed and warned by agents of the FSB while attempting to investigate a series of acts of surveillance against Nikitin and his family on May 3, 1998. The FSB officers threw the lawyer certification of attorney Pavlov in the mud and warned him to "think about what you are doing and where you are meddling."

The FSB's recent aggressive surveillance and harassment campaign against Nikitin coincides with a media campaign by high level Russian officials, declaring Nikitin guilty of espionage before his case has been turned over to the courts for trial. For example, on May 11, 1998, Russian Nuclear Energy Minister Yevgeny Adamov, in a live broadcast on Ekho Moskvy radio, declared unequivocally that Nikitin was engaged in espionage. "I claim with absolute responsibility that 70 percent of [the] information Alexander Nikitin gathered for [the] Norwegian environmentalist organization Bellona has nothing to do with ecology," Adamov said. "These are professionally-styled reconnaissance questions." Such declarations of guilt, similar to prior public pronouncements by the FSB and Russian prosecuting authorities, according to Nikitin's attorneys, are a signal to the St. Petersburg courts that Nikitin must be found guilty. These pronouncements clearly violate the presumption of innocence to which Nikitin is entitled under the Russian Constitution, international agreements binding on Russia, and the European Convention on Human Rights recently ratified by Russia.

The FSB Investigator assigned to Nikitin's case, Alexander Kolb, denied organizing surveillance and harassment of Nikitin and his associates. Nikitin and his attorneys plan to file formal complaints about these tactics with the St. Petersburg chief prosecutor.

Conclusion

The tenuous legal status of the pending charges explains the FSB's sudden escalation of harassment in this case on the heels of Deputy Procurator General Rozanov's letter. Nikitin's Chief Counsel, Yuri Schmidt, said that the increased harassment tactics against Nikitin, his family, and now one of his attorneys "is an attempt by the FSB to force [Nikitin] to admit the charges and receive amnesty." According to Schmidt, "The FSB is stuck with this embarrassing case and has no other way out but to use its old tricks," such as pressuring the accused into pleading guilty and attempting to intimidate his lawyers into not independently and vigorously defending him.

In this atmosphere, Russian courts, notorious for their lack of independence from the prosecution, cannot be expected to provide Nikitin with a fair trial or to overrule the Procurator General and the FSB on the important constitutional and human rights issues inherent in Nikitin's case. Nikitin's case also signals danger for all independent environmentalists and human rights activists working in Russia, that the state security apparatus will not tolerate their actions regardless of the law.

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