Compatriots to be supported in Internet

Recently the official web-site of the Fund to support compatriots abroad, prevfond.ru, has appeared in Runet. The initiative to create the Fund was supported by the Russian President. The Fund was created by the Foreign Ministry and Russian cooperation. The board of trustees is headed by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.

According to Igor Panevkin, Executive Director, Fund to support compatriots abroad, three months have passed since the Fund started its work and during this time we managed to create a legal basis for our work, including the rules of the Fund's grants and subsidies. We have received more than 200 appeals of individuals and organizations, to which we try to react in time. The number of them keeps growing. Almost daily we receive letters inquiring about the Fund's work and expressing certain considerations about its future. We analyze these with attention and we hope that the practice of direct communication, like this press conference, will be very useful for the Fund and its employees. Taking into account that in the first stage it will be difficult to cover all the fields, we would like to focus our effort on the aimed legal support to individuals and organizations in the most important directions that touch the largest parts of the Russian-speaking population. In this framework we plan organizational, informational, legal and financial support, including legal work. Naturally we would like to rely on partner human rights organizations with a positive image that can participate in specific processes to protect the rights of our compatriots.

We are concerned about the violation of the rights of the Russian-speaking population abroad. The lack of translation of legal documents concerning the rights of compatriots, a situation where even the most basic  documents of the social sphere are not available for the Russian-speaking population directly affect human rights and are in the focus of the Fund's attention. Naturally we plan to work on this together with human rights organizations and the local compatriot organizations. Another important sphere of the Fund's work is cooperation with ainternational human rights organizations. We intend to present the Fund on the regional meetings of compatriots planned for this year and to send the representatives of the Fund to some countries to coordinate action with the organizations of compatriots and potential partners.