Human Rights Council members doubt checks of non-profit entities relate to fight against extremism

MOSCOW. March 28 (Interfax) – Prosecutors inspecting non-profit organizations are performing unusual duties, which are virtually repressive, a member of Russia’s Presidential Human Rights Council and board member of Memorial international society, Sergei Krivenko, said.

“We tried to draw an analogy with the current unprecedented inspections in Memorial – nothing like that has happened in the past 25 years. The only analogy was in 1929 when all religious organizations were checked and closed in just a year. There is also the campaign of 1937-1938 when all foreign organizations, foreign clubs and everything with a mere notion of a foreign entity was closed in these two years,” Krivenko said at a news conference in the head office of Interfax on Thursday.

“All this is very sad because instead of performing law enforcement functions, the prosecutor’s office is being used as a kind of a repressive machine. In a sense this can be called repression,” Krivenko said.

Another member of the Presidential Human Rights Council, Pavel Chikov, said he doubted that the prosecutors’ inspections of non-profit organizations were related to the law on fighting extremism.

“The whole story began around February 20, when the Russian Prosecutor’s General Office ordered prosecutors from the 83 Russian subjects to inspect public and religious entities and other non-profit organizations. This was arranged in the framework of the law on fighting against extremism. While in reality in most cases inspections are in no way related to extremism,” Chikov said.

“There are currently reports from 25 regions that around one hundred non-profit organizations are being checked,” Chikov said.

“The focus is on human rights and environmental organizations. Environmentalists are being inspected throughout the country – from St. Petersburg to Kamchatka, where offices of the World Wide Fund for Nature work,” he said.

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 nongovernmental organizations’ activities within the Justice Ministry’s jurisdiction,” it said.