Russia Reduces Crazy Charges Against Green Peace Members
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Russian investigators on Wednesday dropped piracy charges against the crew members of a Greenpeace International ship who staged a protest against oil exploration in the Arctic Ocean last month, but said they would still face lesser charges of hooliganism.
All remain in detention centers in the northern city of Murmansk in what Greenpeace officials describe as grim prison conditions, and they could still face prison sentences as long as seven years if convicted of hooliganism. Piracy convictions carry a maximum penalty of 15 years.
Until Wednesday evening, Russia had shown no sign of bending to criticism from human rights and environmental organizations over its prosecution of the Greenpeace protesters. Only hours earlier, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that it would not recognize an appeal by the Netherlands, where the ship is registered, to resolve the seizure of the ship by a tribunal of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Greenpeace rejected the move to reduce charges, saying that the continuing investigation was meant to stifle debate and peaceful protests. It again called for the immediate release of all the crew members, who have been in detention for nearly a month now.
“The Arctic 30 are no more hooligans than they were pirates,” Vladimir Chuprov, a leader of Greenpeace Russia, said in a statement. “This is still a wildly disproportionate charge that carries up to seven years in jail. It represents nothing less than an assault on the very principle of peaceful protest.”
The ship and its crew were seized by helicopter-borne border guards in the Pechora Sea on Sept. 19, the day after two of its activists briefly scaled the side of Russia’s first offshore oil platform in the Arctic, only to plunge into the icy waters after Russian troops cut their cables and fired warning shots.
Greenpeace staged the action, which was similar to one a year before that ended without arrests, to call attention to what the organization says are the dangers of oil drilling in the fragile Arctic environment. The crew members include citizens from 18 nations, including two from the United States.
The ship and its crew were towed to port in Murmansk, where one by one those aboard were charged with piracy and then one by one denied bail. It was not immediately clear how the change in charges would affect the legal proceedings already under way.
The reduction of the charges appeared to reflect remarks made by President Vladimir V. Putin at a conference on the Arctic a month ago. He suggested that those aboard were clearly not pirates, but he vigorously defended the actions of the border guards and said Russia would not tolerate any infringement on its sovereignty in the Arctic.
The protest focused on the Prirazlomnaya offshore oil platform, not far from the island of Novaya Zemlya, the former nuclear test range for the Soviet Union that was a target of Greenpeace actions in the 1990s. The platform is owned by the state-controlled energy company Gazprom and represents the manifestation of Russia’s ambitions to exploit the natural resources of the Arctic, made more and more accessible by the changing climate.
Gazprom completed the structure last year, though it has delayed actual production until next year amid safety and environmental concerns of the sort Greenpeace has sought to highlight.
The investigative committee, in its statement, also raised the possibility of bringing new charges against some of the crew members, including using violence against the authorities, even though both Greenpeace and the Russian authorities have said none of those aboard were armed or resisted when the ship was seized.
nytimes.com
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