What violations is the Prosecution trying to find in the NGO activities?

By Vestnik Kavkaza

The USA intention to continue financing of separate non-governmental organizations in Russia is direct interference into internal affairs of the RF. The official statement by the representative of the State Department Victoria Nuland that the USA intend to finance separate NGO in Russia through mediators in third countries. According to representative of the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs Alexander Lukashevich, “actually it means direct encouragement of well-known non-governmental and public structures to violation of laws on non-commercial organizations in the territory of Russia.”

At the same time Russian human right defenders have a lot of questions to initiators of the prosecution checks of the NGO. Mikhail Fedotov, member of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, doesn’t understand why representatives of other structures are involved in the process: “An inspection was aimed at checking how the NGOs are fulfilling the law to counter extremist activity. But then we can ask: why then is the tax inspectorate or the fire inspectorate or the consumer goods inspectorate involved? One check-up revealed that an NGO did not have a plan to fight rats. That is indeed a serious shortcoming, but is hardly connected to extremism, unless we assume that rats were used as a bacteriological war weapon.”

“President Vladimir Putin in his address to the Federal Assembly last year said that we need to put a halt to a situation where the quantity of check-ups is more important than their result. As the presidential council we are guided by these words and we want to receive this public report from the General Prosecutor that organized these check-ups. We hope to see and discuss these reports already in April,” Fedotov said.

According to Pavel Chikov, member of the Presidential Council for Human Rights, the main focus is placed on human rights and environmental NGOs: “The task of the General Prosecutor includes tables where the number of the revealed violations should be written down. There is a clear request that they should do it, and in many cases the prosecutors personally came to the offices of the NGOs and also involved experts from other institutions. We see more than 10 different bodies - the FSB, police, the consumer goods inspectorate, Ministry of Emergencies. Everyone comes and checks everything, from the law on personal information to the power of the electricity sockets, as happened in St. Petersburg. So the main task is to find at least some violations.”

Chikov thinks that “the prosecutors are interested in organizations that form public opinion, are engaged in political activity, although it is a big question how we define it, protest actions, public critique of the authorities and the organizations that receive funding from abroad. This of course does not mean that all this should be intertwined in one organization. In several regions the prosecutors came to French language schools, that of course are not involved in politics, although they receive French funding, because they function under the umbrella of the French government. At the moment we have dozens of check-ups in each region. the campaign should be over at the beginning of April. I thing that next week the prosecutors should complete the check-ups and then prepare some analytical reports  By the end of April we hope that the General Prosecutor will finally report on what they eventually found out.”