Chinese parliamentarians interested in Russian experience on NGO law – State Duma Deputy Speaker

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(Interfax – HARBIN, China, May 29, 2013) China as well as Russia is concerned with the issue of non-governmental organizations (NGO) receiving foreign financing and trying to influence the interior policy of the country, Russia’s State Duma First Deputy Speaker Ivan Melnikov, representing the Russian Communist Party faction, said about the results of the visit of Russian parliamentarians to China.

“They have quite a lot of NGOs and there are some, which are financed by foreign countries. They feel in China that there is an attempt to influence the country’s interior policy through some NGOs,” Melnikov told reporters on May 27.

Melnikov said that their Chinese colleagues wanted to study Russian law related to NGO activities closely, including NGO-foreign agents, in order “to see what useful things they could adopt.”

It has become clear during talks in Beijing that the issue was common to the two countries, Melnikov said.

Despite the fact that the Chinese colleagues showed clear interest in the legal regulations of NGO activities in Russia, this issue did not receive much attention and NGOs were mostly discussed within the legislation experience exchange, Melnikov said.

State Duma Committee on Public and Religious Organizations Chairman Yaroslav Nilov of the Liberal Democratic Party faction, who was part of the delegation as well, said that “the issue related to foreign financing is especially acute” in China.

Nilov said that NGOs today were ” civil society institutions and a sign of developed democracy, on the one hand, and possibly an element of pushing some foreign policy decisions (made on the outside), including those aimed at destabilizing the situation in the country, on the other hand. This is how it was with various orange revolutions for example,” he said.

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