22 ‘Foreign Agents’ Detected in Russia After Mass Searches, Prosecutor Says

(Moscow Times – themoscowtimes.com – August 22, 2013) Mass searches of NGOs across the country have helped to detect 22 “foreign agents,” a top official from the Prosecutor General’s Office said Thursday.

The law, which requires non-governmental organizations that receive funding from abroad and engage in “political activity” to register as “foreign agents,” came into effect in November.

In March, prosecutors and other state agencies began searching hundreds of groups, in what Western officials and human rights activists said was an attempt to shut down the activities of human rights groups in Russia.

Prominent human rights organizations like Moscow Helsinki Group, Moscow’s office of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and elections watchdog Golos were among those to have been searched.

Twenty-two of the 1,000 NGOs that were checked by the agency were classified as “foreign agents,” two of which were found to be engaged in extremist activity, while another two were shut down on terrorism charges, said Alexei Zhafyarov, the deputy head of the Prosecutor General’s Office.

The searches will continued until all 2,200 Russian NGOs suspected by prosecutors of receiving funding from abroad have been checked, he said.

He also said that 500 violations of Russian legislation by NGOs were detected and that warnings were issued to 193 organizations.

Earlier this month, activists from an NGO in Kostroma filed their first complaint with the Constitutional Court, asking the court to explain the meaning of the term “political activity” used in the so-called foreign agents law and saying that the law itself violates at least five articles of the Constitution.

Earlier, the Justice Ministry said the searches were an effort to check compliance with the law, but at a meeting with members of the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council on Thursday, Zhavyarov said the purposes were much wider. He didn’t elaborate on his comment.