MURMANSK, October 31 (Itar-Tass) - Investigators have rounded up the issuance of charges with hooliganism to the Greenpeace activists detained on the Arctic Sunrise icebreaker in mid-September, Maria Favorskaya, a press office for Greenpeace Russia told Itar-Tass Thursday.
The issuance of charges to all the thirty members of the crew took more than a week, she said.
“A number of procedural complications emerged - in the first place, the ones linked to the translation of charges,” Favorskaya said. “Mistakes cropped up in the process of translation and that’s why many of the detainees didn’t sign the required documents at once.”
She indicated that neither the defendants nor their lawyers have received any official documents that would confirm the dropping the charges with piracy against the Greenpeaceniks. As for the accusations of hooliganism, the lawyers working for the organizations plan to appeal them.
September 18, the Arctic Sunrise icebreaker approached the marine drilling platform Prirazlomnaya, which is engaged in operations on the continental shelf in the Pechora Sea, and the activists who had arrived aboard the icebreaker made an attempt to get on to it.
Their action was aborted by border guards reporting to the Murmansk regional branch of the Border Department of Russia’s Federal Security Service /FSB/ and the ship itself was towed to Murmansk after that.
A local court authorized the activists’ arrest for a period of two months and placed them to detention centers in the Murmansk region.
A court of the second instance turned down a petition by the Greenpeaceniks’ lawyers at the beginning of October to mitigate the pretrial restriction measure for the activists and reaffirmed their stay in custody through to November 24.