Russia: No NGOs Have Registered As ‘Foreign Agents’
(RIA Novosti – May 15, 2013) None of the NGOs financed from abroad and involved in political activities have fulfilled their obligations under the law that requires them to register as “foreign agents”, RIA Novosti new agency quoted the deputy director of the Justice Ministry’s department for NGO issues, Tatyana Vagina, as saying in the State Duma on 15 May.
The law that obliges political NGOs financed from abroad to register as foreign agents came into force on 21 November 2012.
“By today none of the organizations that fulfils the functions of a foreign agent has been entered in the register (of foreign agents),” Vagina said in the State Duma.
Election monitoring NGO Golos
Vagina noted that a court ruling requiring the election monitoring NGO Golos to register as a foreign agent has not yet come into force and is being challenged in courts, and because of this NGO has not been entered in the register.
A member of the council for the development of the civil society and human rights under the Russian president, Igor Borisov, said at the round table meeting in the State Duma that “the Golos organization is a powerful octopus, a network organization. There is the Golos Association – this is the front… In Moscow three structures of this organization have been registered and receive funds,” Borisov said.
According to him, the organization itself says that no financial flows go through it. In reality, however, according to Borisov, flows of funds go through the organizations below it and 99.9 per cent of the funds come from abroad.
NGOs receive funding from abroad
“Today 224,170 non-governmental organizations have been registered with the Justice Ministry and the law enforcement bodies checked less one thousand organizations – this is 0.5 per cent of all the organizations while administrative responsibility was imposed on only 0.01 per cent of them,” Borisov said.
According to the information of the Federal Service for Financial Monitoring, since the law on NGOs that are foreign agents came into force (in November 2012), over 10,000 transfers from abroad have been made to the accounts of the Russian NGOs, the Justice Ministry said. “Over 10,000 transactions, transfers to the accounts of these organizations were made,” Interfax quoted Vagina as saying. According to her, the Federal Service for Financial Monitoring “monitors only transactions larger than R200,000”. She clarified that these figures concerned transactions since 21 November 2012, when the law came into force, and related to all NGOs registered with the Justice Ministry, not just the ones involved in political activities.