MOSCOW, October 8 (RIA Novosti) – A court in Russia’s Arctic port of Murmansk began hearings Tuesday to decide if the 30 detainees from a Greenpeace icebreaker seized last month on piracy allegations should stay behind bars pending trial.
The three people having their appeals heard Tuesday are all Russian nationals: Yekaterina Zaspa, the ship’s doctor; Andrei Allakhverdov, a Greenpeace spokesman; and Denis Sinyakov, a freelance photographer who was covering the ship’s two-month voyage in the Russian Arctic. All sought to be released on bail or placed under house arrest.
By mid-day, the court had rejected Zaspa’s appeal. Sinyakov’s was ongoing and Allakhverdov’s would be heard later in the day.
The Greenpeace vessel, the Arctic Sunrise, was seized by Russian border guards in mid-September after several activists tried to scale an oil rig operated by an affiliate of state-run gas giant Gazprom in the Pechora Sea to protest against oil drilling in the Arctic, which environmentalists call hazardous and unprofitable.
The ship was towed to Murmansk, where all 30 people on board – who include nationals of 18 countries – were charged with piracy, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, and put in pretrial detention.
Greenpeace Russia said Monday it would contest the activists’ detention in the European Court of Human Rights if the Murmansk court rejected the appeals.
The environmental group also staged worldwide protests against the crackdown last week, gathering 1 million signatures supporting the release of the “Arctic 30.”
The Dutch Foreign Ministry said last week it would contest the seizure of the Arctic Sunrise – sailing under the Dutch flag – in the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg if the ship and the people on board are not released.
Russian diplomats shot back Saturday, accusing the ship of “illegal activities” that the government of the Netherlands did nothing to prevent.
The detention of Sinyakov caused a particular outcry because he is a journalist and was denounced by many leading media outlets in Russia, as well as the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, as a crackdown on freedom of the press.
Sinyakov, a renowned photographer who has worked with Reuters and the French news agency AFP, was contracted by Greenpeace to cover the Arctic Sunrise voyage, but also had an assignment for the story from a Russian news website.
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