  2002 Annual Report |
|
Asia |
| Europe |
| Mid-East |
| Africa |
| Americas |
As a result of the European call for a boycott of Israeli academics, an Egyptian-born editor and owner of two academic journals, Mona Baker, demanded the resignation of two Israeli consulting editors from her journals. When these two, Dr. Miriam Schlesinger and Dr. Gideon Toury, refused, they were summarily fired. As part of the ensuing hubbub, we were among the first of many to call upon the editors of those journals to uphold their Publication Details to publish matter "not restricted in scope to any particular school of thought or academic group," deploring this action as a direct violation of all academic and human rights standards.
Turkey
The offices of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (HRFT) located in Diyarbakir were the locus for a number of problems. The Center for the Rehabilitation of Torture Victims there, sited very close to the areas of conflict with Kurds and therefore receiving many patients from that conflict, was raided in September of 2001 for its staff files. The information in those files, as feared, was subsequently employed for purposes of intimidation. For example, Drs. Recai Aldemir and M. Emin Yuksel were transferred away from the Diyarbakir Center, preventing them from continuing their important work there. Understandably intimidated, patients have been dissuaded from going to the center. And in March the legal representative of the HRFT was to be tried on charges of improperly establishing the Diyarbakir center. The charges were baseless, as had been determined by the courts in similar cases. We twice called upon the Turkish government to end the harassment and to safeguard the work of this organization.
In a follow-up to our individual actions, we sent a letter with more than 500 signatures from the scientific community to the competent authorities.
Russia
As in 2001, we protested the detainment of Dr. Igor Sutyagin, accused of espionage and high treason. He had been imprisoned since October 1999 and a decision of the Kaluga Regional court to reopen the investigation of his case promised further delay in releasing him. Considering the inability of prosecutors to demonstrate Dr. Sutyagin's access to any classified sources, we requested that, at the very least, he be released from detention before the trial, and that if the trial exonerated him, he be freed immediately.
Several months later, we wrote yet again, after the Supreme Court upheld the above-mentioned court decision and denied the early release we requested. As Dr. Sutyagin's research was based, not upon secret documents, but upon material freely available in the open Russian press, it was clear that the question of spying was ill founded. That his imprisonment--which at this point had lasted for two and a half years--was severely affecting Dr. Sutyagin's health made our letter all the more urgent.
When Dr. Sutyagin's case was transferred from the Kaluga Regional Court--which had earlier ruled that the prosecution had presented insufficient evidence to convict Dr. Sutyagin--to the central department of the Federal Security Service (FSB), we again wrote and protested that the transfer would result in undue political pressure on the court to convict.
Follow-up on another case of a scientist imprisoned and in failing health that surfaced last year involved Valentin Danilov. Dr. Danilov, an eminent cosmic physicist, had attempted to sell research materials to a Chinese import-export company. Although these materials had long been declassified and available openly for years, he was arrested in February of last year. A massive heart attack while in detention and his subsequent physical deterioration spurred our letter asking for his release on humanitarian grounds. He was released recently by order of the Krasnoyarsk City Court. However, this does not preclude the possibility that the FSB may yet prevail and bring him to trial at a higher court. Danilov attributes his release to unrelenting pressure from foreign colleagues.
In addition, we wrote the competent authorities on behalf of both men, with more than 500 endorsing signatures from members of the academic and scientific communities.
Belarus
Dr. Yury Bandazhevsky was arrested in 1999 and in 2001 he was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment for accepting bribes from candidates for admission to the Gomel Medical Institute, which he headed. On both occasions, CCS worked on his behalf. The evidence against him was spurious; among other items, the co-defendant who had leveled this accusation retracted it both during further police interrogation and at the trial, as well as in an open letter to the president of Belarus. Perversely, the court rejected the retraction and entered the original accusation as evidence. It appeared clear that the conviction was provoked by Dr. Bandazhevsky's scientific work, which criticized governmental programs related to the impact of the radioactive fallout of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and which failed effectively to address the health of people living in the surrounding contaminated area. And thus, when we learned this year that Dr. Bandazhevsky's health had deteriorated drastically, we called for a presidential pardon.
