Closed for re-reporting

NGOs ask to be freed from excessive government control

It is possible that the state will listen to the requests of Russian non-governmental organizations to soften the legislation regulating their activities . Such an encouraging statement was made yesterday by the Chairman of the Presidential Council for Promoting the Development of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights, Ella Pamfilova. The official human rights activist said that the council she heads, together with the Federal Registration Service, monitors the application of legislation on NGOs , and the expert group accumulates complaints and suggestions coming from civil society institutions themselves. “Most likely, based on the results of this monitoring, amendments will be made based on proposals from public organizations,” Ms. Pamfilova shared her plans.

The possibility of liberalizing legislation on NGOs became a subject of discussion only after Vladimir Putin admitted that the current “instructions for the law on non-profit organizations could be overly bureaucratic.” The nature of the current legislation is evidenced by the data of Rosregistration itself. “In most regions, 20-25% of the number of registered organizations were able to submit annual reports,” Yuri Dzhibladze, president of the Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, refers to the Federal Reserve. Thus, most of the 350 thousand NGOs operating in Russia are threatened with liquidation.

As Mr. Dzhibladze told Vremya Novostey, NGO experts propose introducing three groups of amendments to the law and job descriptions. “Firstly, it is necessary to sharply reduce the powers of Rosregistration to conduct inspections, which we regard as an instrument of pressure and interference,” the human rights activist lists. Non-governmental organizations propose to replace the report to the Federal Reserve with mandatory public reporting of organizations to the “direct recipients of NGO services” - citizens through the media and the Internet. The second proposal concerns simplification of registration of new NGOs and re-registration of existing organizations. And finally, the third and most painful issue is reporting. As human rights activists emphasize, in order to prepare and send all the necessary papers to various authorities, a staff of lawyers, accountants, and a serious technical base is required. And, as a rule, small human rights structures, especially those that work in the regions, cannot cope with the sharply tightened requirements of the law. “I can responsibly say that almost every organization that has been inspected under the new legislation receives from Rosregistration a complete set of identified violations,” says Mr. Dzhibladze. Moreover, those violations that in the past were regarded as minor, technical, are now considered as a reason for issuing warnings and, in the future, for closing NGOs.

“It is difficult to say what is the current fate of the amendments we have prepared and whether the bill will be submitted to the State Duma,” the head of the Center for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights notes cautiously. The NGO's proposals were reviewed at the very top - in April, the draft amendments were transferred through Ella Pamfilova to Vladimir Putin and sent for examination to the presidential administration. However, at the stage of approval by the government, the bill was stuck. “In mid-June, we learned that the Ministry of Justice gave a negative opinion on the amendments,” notes Dzhibladze. According to Vremya Novostey's interlocutor, lawyers for non-governmental organizations expect that the bill will be considered before the end of the year - before the expiration of the powers of the current State Duma. “Otherwise, there will simply be no time for this later - new parliamentary, then presidential elections, and the current repressive legislation will continue to operate,” the human rights activist concludes.

Mikhail MOSHKIN