“My brother is not a pirate or a hooligan. He is a loving person and a conscientious citizen.”

So declares Jane Stirling, sister of Colborne, Ont., native Paul Ruzycki, held for over a month in a cramped and reportedly unheated cell in Murmansk, Russia. Ruzycki has been allowed only one hour outside the cell each day.

Ruzycki, along with fellow Canadian Alexandre Paul, is among the “Arctic 30,” a group of Greenpeace activists and two journalists arrested late September in international waters for protesting arctic oil drilling.

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly admitted the accusations of piracy were misplaced, and Russian authorities promised to reduce them, the charges of piracy were not only upheld recently by a Russian court, but also augmented by charges of hooliganism. Taken together, these charges carry jail sentences for up to 15 years.

Russia’s fiercely high-handed approach to the crew of the Greenpeace vessel Arctic Sunrise, who were taken at gunpoint in international waters following an attempt to unfurl a banner on a Russian oil-drilling platform, has sparked widespread protest across the globe.

The Dutch government is taking legal action at the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea to have the protestors released, and British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton all have spoken out about the situation.

In addition, the International Federation of Journalists and the European Federation of Journalists have demanded the release of the two journalists, and 1.3 million have signed petitions calling for the crew’s liberation.

The arrest has also prompted a letter by 11 Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and Costa Rica’s Oscar Arias, urging Putin to drop the piracy charges against the crew.

In their joint letter, the Nobel Prize recipients urge that any charges that may be laid against the protestors be consistent with international law, adding that any oil spill in the pristine Arctic waters would be “devastating and long-lasting.”

Significantly, they point out that the issue being highlighted by the Greenpeace activists is not simply a potential environmental nightmare from uncontrolled spills, as witnessed by the 2010 BP Deep Water Horizon debacle in the Gulf of Mexico, but the larger issue of how Arctic oil drilling contributes to climate change.

Despite pleas from family members of the Greenpeace Canada and Amnesty International Canada head Alex Neve, the Canadian government has yet to speak out publicly against the arrest.

Sadly, this is not entirely surprising, given the federal government’s withdrawal from the Kyoto climate change protocol and its suggestion that certain peaceful environmentalists, including aboriginal activists, are “eco-terrorists.”

The outlandish charges of piracy against Greenpeace by Russia, in fact, have a less dramatic, but nonetheless disturbing, parallel in Canada. Alberta physician Dr. John O’Connor, after highlighting elevated rates of cancer in Fort Chipewyan as a possible result of tarsands tailings, was figuratively “tarred and feathered” by provincial and federal authorities.

In 2007, for raising health concerns, O’Connor was targeted by federal officials from Health Canada and accused of sundry violations, including engendering “mistrust in government” and causing “undue alarm” among residents. While O’Connor was exonerated by the Alberta College of Physicians and Surgeons of the spurious charges, it was only after protests by Fort Chipewyan residents that O’Connor’s name was fully cleared.

For Canadian Arctic Greenpeace campaigner Christy Ferguson, who served on the vessel before it was seized, the ponderous influence of oil and gas corporate interests over governmental policies around the world is overshadowing democratic decision-making, and the right to criticize and hold governments accountable for their environmental policies.

Recent environmental disasters such as the BP oil spill, and the nuclear disaster at Fukishima, are reminders of the importance of citizen advocacy to the democratic process.

Russia’s efforts to criminalize this type of advocacy is disturbing — it suggests that no one has the right to question what they are doing in these waters. But the Arctic is part of our “common backyard,” and we do have the right to know what is going on there, and, most importantly, if it is being done safely.

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Stephen Bede Scharper is a professor of environmental studies at the University of Toronto. His column appears monthly. Stephen.scharper@utoronto.ca

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