Ten Strategies for Defending against Criminal Charges
- Get a local criminal defense lawyer to represent the environmental defender. While many environmental defenders cannot afford to hire a lawyer, these services are often available on a reduced rate or even for free. Funding is sometimes available from groups such as Front Line. EDLC can sometimes assist in identifying sources of funding.
- Request international legal help to assist the local criminal defense lawyer with the case. EDLC specializes in finding pro bono (free) American and European legal help through its Law firm pro bono program.
- If the charges are for criminal defamation, learn more about these types of charges in Defending against defamation cases.
- Learn about human rights laws and remedies that may protect the environmental defender and allow a challenge to the charges.
- Get help from human rights bodies within the country. Many of these governmental bodies are prepared to take an active advocacy role, even against another branch of the government.
- Seek help from local, national, and international non-governmental organizations that work on these issues. Many of these organizations issue appeals to people around the world to send letters and emails or make phone calls to government officials urging dismissal of the charges. Consider contacting Amnesty International to request an Appeal for Action or Urgent Action. Global Response is a U.S.-based organization whose work focuses on the environment and includes campaigns and emergency actions to mobilize its members on behalf of endangered environmental defenders.
- Consider getting press coverage at the local, national, and international levels. Governments count on cases of this type being "below the radar." Increasing the level of attention paid to the case may not only attract additional resources, but discourage the government from pursuing the charges for fear of unwelcome public attention, especially at the international level.
- Use political and diplomatic contacts, whether inside or outside the country, as a means of applying pressure for dismissal of the charges. International legal help can be especially useful in this regard.
- Try to learn about similar cases, whether inside the country or elsewhere, and contact those other environmental defenders and their lawyers to learn from their experiences in combating similar charges.
- Internationalize the case, using some or all of the above strategies, to show how internationally-protected human rights are being violated, and how the case must be looked at as part of the global problem of the persecution of environmental defenders.
According to legal experts, he is the only Russian citizen ever to be charged so many times with the same crime.
- The Goldman Environmental Foundation, describing the repeated re-trials in the case against environmental defender Alexsandr Nikitin before he was finally acquitted of all charges.