MOSCOW, September 26 - RAPSI. On Wednesday the Supreme Court's presidium upheld the sentence handed to academic Igor Sutyagin who was convicted to 15 years in prison for espionage and then later pardoned.

The panel of judges chaired by Pyotr Serkov upheld the proposal by Supreme Court Chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev in connection with the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Sutyagin v. Russia.

The ECHR sided with Sutyagin in his application against the Russian authorities and ruled in May that he should be paid 20,000 Euros for violations and in moral damages.

Sutyagin's defense attorneys are not satisfied with the judgment and intend to take the matter to the Council of the European Union.

In Sutyagin's address to the Supreme Court, he asked for his case to be terminated.

Sutyagin appealed to the court in July 2002. Six years later, in July 2008, the court accepted his application to consider whether the permissible pretrial detention period had been extended without good reason. Sutyagin complained that his trial lacked independence and impartiality, and claimed the violation of articles 7 (no punishment for an act which does not constitute an offence in the law) and 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Sutyagin initially sought 300,000 Euros in moral damages.

The Strasbourg court found that various articles of the convention had been violated during the Russian court's investigation of Sutyagin's case.

Sutyagin, who headed the Military and Technical Economic Policy Department at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, was charged with divulging state secrets to the British consulting company Alternative Futures. According to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the company served as a cover for U.S. intelligence and his work had nothing to do with scientific research.

Sutyagin was found guilty of state treason and sentenced to 15 years in prison on April 7, 2004.

Alongside three other individuals sentenced to prison for espionage, Sutyagin was traded for 10 individuals arrested in the United States on charges of spying for Russia in June 2010. He currently lives in London.