14 DAY TRIAL // The 30 Greenpeace activists and supporters that were arrested back in September following a protest against oil and gas giant Gazprom might have been granted bail and freed from prison, but recent news on the topic says that they are a long way from also being allowed to leave Russia and return home.
In a press release issued earlier today, Greenpeace explains that Russia's Investigative Committee has sent a letter to one of the Arctic 30, i.e. environmentalist Anne Mie Jensen from Denmark, and has suggested that neither she nor her colleagues are free to leave the country.
“Russia’s powerful Investigative Committee has written to one of the 30 - Anne Mie Jensen from Denmark - indicating that they are not free to leave the country.”
“Lawyers for Greenpeace expect all of the non-Russian defendants to be treated in the same way by the authorities, meaning they would now be forced to stay in St Petersburg for Christmas and possibly well beyond,” the organization writes on its website.
More precisely, it appears that Russia's Investigative Committee is unwilling to ask the country's Federal Migration Service to issue the visas that the environmentalists need in order to be able to leave Russia.
In the absence of a direct order from the Investigative Committee, the Migration Service will not grant the Arctic 30 their visas.
Greenpeace maintains that, by forcing the Arctic 30 to remain in St. Petersburg, Russian authorities are defying a direct order that the country received from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea back in November.
Thus, on November 22, the Tribunal ordered that Russia immediately allow the Arctic 30 to leave the country and return home, and also release the Arctic Sunrise, i.e. the Greenpeace ship that was taken in custody together with the environmentalists.
The Arctic 30 and their ship were to be freed following Greenpeace's paying a €3.6 million ($4.95 million) bond. The organization says that, since the bond was paid on November 29, Russia no longer has any business holding the activists and their ship captive.
“The Russian Federation is now in clear breach of a binding order of an international tribunal. As President Vladimir Putin stated in his famous open letter to the American people on Syria, ‘The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not.’”
“In his State of the Nation speech yesterday in Moscow, he added: ‘We try not to lecture anyone but promote international law.’ It’s time for the authorities to act in that spirit and allow the Arctic 30 to go home to their families immediately,” Greenpeace International legal counsel Daniel Simons commented on this situation.