Human Rights Council wants to discuss NGO checks with Russian Prosecutor General

(Interfax – MOSCOW. March 28, 2013) Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council is expecting Russian Prosecutor General Yury Chaika to explain the purposes of numerous inspections of non-governmental organizations (NGO) at the upcoming session of the council in April.

“We have asked the Prosecutor General to participate in the council meeting so that representatives of the Prosecutor’s General Office can report the results of these inspections. I hope that we will see such a report in April and will be able to discuss it,” Human Rights Council Chairman Mikhail Fedotov said at a news conference at the head office of Interfax on Thursday.

Fedotov said that the goal of NGO check was not quite explicable.

“We wanted to send a statement to the Prosecutor’s General Office since these are prosecutor’s inspections. But in many cases employees of other regulatory authorities were involved. Which is possible, from the one hand, but from the other, the question “why?” raises,” Fedotov said.

Fedotov said that the council had received prosecutors’ documents from Russian regions saying that inspections were held in an attempt to determine how NGO were following the law on the fight against extremism.

Tax and prosecution officials arrived at the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch (HRW) at 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday, Rachel Denber, deputy director of HRW’s Europe and Central Asia Division, told Interfax.

A wave of inspections of non-governmental organizations in Russia is underway, and HRW is among those being inspected, she said.

Denber described the inspections as pressure on civil society, which cannot be perceived otherwise.

Interfax has yet to obtain official commentaries from law enforcement regarding the inspection of HRW’s Moscow office.

Earlier this week, prosecutors, the Justice Ministry and tax authorities carried out inspections at the Russian offices of Amnesty International, the movement For Human Rights, the Memorial society, and the Public Verdict foundation. Rights activists said the inspections were apparently related to the law on NGOs acting as “foreign agents,” which took effect in Russia on November 21, 2012.

The law obliges NGOs fully or partially financed from abroad to be registered as “foreign agents.”

The Justice Ministry said on March 25 that the NGOs were being inspected to reveal such “foreign agents.” Justice Ministry officials have been engaged in the inspections, it said. “The inspections are aimed at examining the non-governmental organizations’ activities within the Justice Ministry’s jurisdiction,” it said.