notes with a view to their publication in Boyevaya Vakhta. In this respect the court noted that the applicant had been fully aware of the relevant regulations which prohibited publication of information disclosing the actual names of military formations and units, and there had therefore been no practical use for such information in the applicant's publications.
26. The court further examined the conclusions of the expert report of 14 September 2001 in respect of the other items of information imputed to the applicant, compared them with the other materials of the case and rejected them as unreliable. In particular, the court stated that some of the pieces of information imputed to the applicant, including the list of accidents on Russian nuclear submarines and the map of the territory of military unit No. 40752, could be found in public sources, such as a military reference book on submarines, or a Greenpeace report. In this respect the court noted that receiving, keeping and disseminating publicly accessible information was not punishable under the Russian legislation in force and that there was no practical need to classify information which could be found in public sources.
27. The court thus acquitted the applicant of all the other charges listed in the indictment, some of them having been waived by the prosecuting party.
28. In view of the fact that the applicant had a minor child, no criminal record and positive professional references and decorations, and given that his offence had caused no damage, since he had not transferred the impugned information, the court referred to the "special-circumstances" clause of Article 64 of the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure and sentenced the applicant to a term below the statutory minimum, namely, four years' imprisonment in a strict-security correctional colony, and deprivation of a military rank.
2. Appeal proceedings
29. In their appeal submissions the defence complained, inter alia, that the experts who had drafted the report of 14 September 2001 had relied on unpublished Decree No. 055 of the Ministry of Defence in asserting the classified nature of the impugned information. The defence argued that the use of Decree No. 055 by the experts had resulted in the incorrect application of the State Secrets Act by the first-instance court. They further argued that the State Secrets Act had been applied retrospectively, since there had been no list of information constituting State secrets at the time of the commission of the offence in question. The defence also contended that, in any event, the information contained in the applicant's notes had been accessible from public sources.
30. On 25 June 2002 the Supreme Court of Russia upheld the applicant's conviction on appeal, having excluded a reference to the unlawfulness of his presence at the meeting of 11 September 1997 and to the general unlawfulness of his off-duty contacts with foreign nationals.
31. The Supreme Court noted that the question whether the applicant's handwritten notes had contained State secrets had been thoroughly and objectively examined in the first-instance judgment. It confirmed that the trial court had based its judgment on the expert report of 14 September 2001, which had stated that "information disclosing the actual names of highly critical and secured military formations and units and information on the presence among the participants in the military exercises of the military intelligence units and information on the means and methods of protection of classified data [constituted] State secrets under section 5, paragraphs 1 (6) and 4 (5) of the State Secrets Act of the Russian Federation (No. 5485-1) of 21 July 1993, as amended by Federal Law No. 131-FZ of 6 October 1997, paragraphs 13 and 77 of the List of Information classified as State Secrets, approved by Decree of the President of
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