On the first day of October, Vladimir Putin gathered the members of the Council for Civil Society and Human Rights in the Kremlin. "The role of socially-oriented organizations, the so-called third sector, is now growing worldwide. Russia is no exception here. Today we have more than 670 thousand people who work in NGOs. And considering the existing public demand, of course, this is not the limit," the president stated.
Returning from the Kremlin, participants of the meeting gave their assessments.
"I see our meeting as very important, crucial, because very important theses were voiced there for the first time. Theses of a very abstract, I would say, ideological character. The first idea is that the state should be a human rights defender. The second moment, the idea was voiced that the state should assist human rights defenders and human rights activists and consider them to be their helpers in building the rule of law. This is a fundamentally important position, it was voiced in the speech of the president. A concrete manifestation of this position became the presidential decree on the establishment of the State Prize for outstanding achievements in human rights activities and charitable activities," the Chairman of the Presidential Council for Civic Society Institutions and Human Rights Mikhail Fedotov stated.
He also said that "much has been said about the so-called law ‘On foreign agents.’ I think the most important thing is that the president said that it is necessary to clarify the concept of ‘political activity’, because today, in practice, organizations which have no relation to any policy and are engaged in social issues, like the majority of women's organizations, environmental organizations, human rights organizations are under the same classification. And those organizations which are engaged in political activities are not represented there, and this is surprising."
A member of the HRC, Igor Yurgens, told the president about transport problems: "I told the president unpleasant things, particularly about parking and about towing. And I told him about pleasant things. A nice thing lies in the fact that the project of the electronic insurance policy, when there is no need for one to go to insurance companies, one can make insurance online at home, it was started by the efforts of the Central Bank and the insurers for car owners. Europrotocol entered into force. The settlement of small accidents on the streets without attracting the road patrol service increased from 10% to 15%, that makes life easier."
Meanwhile, according to Yurgens, "two people in the country should use a motorcade, traffic stops for them, and we understand that those people are the president and the prime minister. The number of flashing lights appearing on certain streets of Moscow, and other cities, the number of people who consider themselves to be above everyone and drive as they wish, park where they want, and their number plates are outside the surveillance zone, even the law enforcement one. Here's what I mentioned. Let's see the reaction."
Another member of the HRC, Sergei Tsiplenkov, focused on the fire catastrophe: "The forest guard, which was abolished after the introduction of the new forest code, so-called new, although it is already 10 years old, the forest code has began to come back to the forests. There are incorrect numbers about the scale, the speed of development of the forest and wildfires, which leads to the fact that decisions are wrong or taken at the wrong time. For example, if we talk about the Baikal region, an emergency regime should have been introduced at least 16 days earlier, when we could still do something. We simply need to take these measures in order to prevent a catastrophe."
