"Today's decision by the Supreme Court board has confirmed that the legal proceedings at the Moscow City Court concerning the Igor Sutyagin case were in no way faulty," said the prosecutor Yevgeny Naidenov as the trial was over.
According to one of Sutyagin's lawyers, Boris Kuznetsov, the defense appealed against the sentence and for re-trial on the grounds that one of the jurymen at the past session had been registered at the Moscow district military court rather than the Moscow City court where the prosecution was underway.
"This is a breach of law," said the lawyer.
Mr. Naidenov, however, argued that a higher court had disproved this argument as groundless.
"The defense had every chance to challenge this juror at the Moscow City Court since the selection of jurors is the responsibility of both the prosecutor and the council," said the prosecutor.
Boris Kuznetsov has already reported about the decision of the European Human Rights Court to give priority to this case trial.
The appeal to the European Court was based on the unmotivated jury reshuffle as well as an infringement on the timeframe of the case consideration at the Moscow City Court, said the lawyer. He continued that the defense was in a position to apply to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.
After Igor Sutyagin was found guilty of treason by the unanimous decision of 12-men jury and denied commutation by the 8-to-4 vote on April 5, the Moscow City court passed the verdict of espionage and sentenced him to 15 years in top-security prison on April 7.
At a trial which began on November 3, 2003, Igor Sutyagin, arms researcher at the foreign politics department of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, was charged with passing classified information to Britain's Alternative Futures Consulting company. The latter was a kind of disguise for U.S. intelligence and had nothing to do with scientific activities.
Mr. Sutyagin does not admit his guilt, denying his having passed information about Russia to foreign citizens. He argues however that he got information from open sources-newspapers and journals. Mr. Sutyagin's case was already tried by the Kaluga regional court and submitted for re-trial on December 27, 2001 on the grounds of "the grave
violation of the Criminal and Procedure Code during the pre-trial investigation." It was also ruled that the charges extended were not specified.
Once the further inquiry conducted by the Federal Security Service was completed, the case was taken to the Moscow City court.
