Russian NGOs accused of being ‘foreign agents’ vindicated – report

(Interfax – October 23, 2013) A report published on the website of the Human Rights Council under the Russian president says practically all the cases in which the Prosecutor-General’s Office (PGO) accused NGOs of being in breach of the controversial recent law on “foreign agents” have been thrown out by courts, privately-owned Russian news agency Interfax reported on 23 October. The report also disputed PGO’s figures on foreign funding received by NGOs.

“Of the 10 instances of administrative proceedings launched under Article 19.34 of the Russian Administrative Offences Code (breaching the rules for the operation of a noncommercial organization performing the functions of a foreign agent), eight were dismissed by the courts, which pointed out a massive number of breaches committed by prosecution workers,” says the report, which was compiled by the Agora interregional association of human rights groups on the results of NGO checks in 2013. Only court rulings on the Kostroma Foundation for the Support of Public Initiatives and its leader have entered legal force, Agora said; even these have now been appealed against, and the appeal has the support of Russian Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir Lukin.

Furthermore, not a single NGO officially warned or charged in connection with the law has joined the register of so-called foreign agents as a result, the report said.

The PGO’s conclusion that the NGOs it deemed to be engaged in political activities received funding in excess of R6bn, or 190m dollars, in 2010-13, was “unsubstantiated and untrue”, it said. The only NGO found by any court to be in breach of the law, the Kostroma foundation, received a total of R420,000, or just over 13,000 dollars.

The checks of NGOs carried out across Russia on the orders of the PGO focused on those that received funds from abroad and on human rights organizations, the Agora report said. “In fact, the objective results of the checks of NGOs by prosecutors have confirmed that noncommercial organizations in Russia perform their duties in accordance with the law and act solely in the interests of Russian citizens,” the report concludes.

On 21 October Interfax reported that the Human Rights Council had written to Prosecutor-General Yuriy Chayka, asking for all the checks to be suspended until a complaint about the law lodged by several NGOs was considered by the Constitutional Court.

The law obliging all NGOs, or noncommercial organizations, as they are known in Russia, which engage in “political activities” and receive funding from abroad to register with the Justice Ministry as “foreign agents” entered force on 21 November 2012. Many well-known NGOs, such as Memorial, the Moscow Helsinki Group and Golos, said they would not register.

Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov conceded in June 2013 that the law contained no mechanism to force any NGO to register as a foreign agent, though non-complying NGOs could still be closed down. Later in the same month Moscow-based Assistance to the Development of Competition in CIS Countries became the first NGO to be entered on the ministry’s register, Interfax recalled.