Leading Russian NGOs may switch to voluntary basis – veteran rights activist

Lyudmila Alekseyeva file photo

(Interfax – Moscow, November 13, 2013) Russia’s key non-governmental organizations could change to the voluntary principle of operating because of pressure from the authorities, the head of the oldest human rights organization in Russia, Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, told Interfax on Wednesday [13 November].

“It pains me to look how our human rights movement is being destroyed. Not a single organization is registering as a foreign agent. We will not halt our work, we will work as volunteers,” she said.

Alekseyeva announced that without legal registration Russian human rights organizations will be less effective.

“However, we will work anyway. Without money, registration or office – as in Iran or Syria,” she said.

“The Moscow Helsinki Group was set up in 1976 in the Soviet Union. There was no office, no financing at all, not just no foreign financing. We worked and became an organization that is known around the world, despite the prosecution from the authorities,” Alekseyeva said.

The Russian human rights activists boycott the law on non-governmental organizations (NGO). It requires that organizations that receive grants from abroad register as foreign agents.

[Passage omitted: At a meeting with deputy governors of regions, the head of the Presidential Administration, Sergey Ivanov, called on regional authorities to ensure that all NGOs that receive funding from abroad would either register as foreign agents or cease their work.]

“The forces that under the cover of NGOs receive foreign financing and serve foreign interests must either openly declare that they carry out the function of a foreign agent or end their activities on the territory of our country,” Ivanov said. [passage omitted]

None of the regional organizations that are part of the Memorial human rights association will register as foreign agents, the head of the Memorial association, Arseniy Roginskiy, announced at the end of September.

According to him, as a result of checks by the prosecutor’s office, three organizations were told to register in the registry of NGOs that are foreign agents – these were the Memorial human rights center in Moscow, the Memorial anti-discrimination center in St Petersburg and the Memorial youth organization in Perm. “I can confidently say about these three organizations that none of them would under any circumstances register itself as a foreign agent. This is impossible for Memorial,” he said.

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