NPO "Shield and Sword" refused to provide data to the prosecutors

The Chuvash human rights NPO "Shield and Sword", co -founder and partner of the Agora Association, refused to provide prosecutors with data on their activities. This was told by Kommersant by the head of the organization Alexei Glukhov. He considers the verification illegal.

The day before, the organization received a notification from the prosecutor's office of Novocheboksarsk with a request to provide a copy of the charter, data on its activities, as well as lists of sources of financing and cash receipts since 2010. Glukhov said that this requirement is illegal. The prosecutor’s office calls the check of the “shield and sword” of the planned, the human rights activist explained, but his organization is not included in the annual plan of audits, published on the website of the supervisory authority. In addition, Glukhov added, they are not warned about planned checks the day before.

The human rights activist has already prepared an official response to the prosecutor's office. It states that "information about the organization’s activities is at the disposal of the Ministry of Justice, and data on financing sources are submitted annually not only to the ministry, but also to the tax service." Also, Glukhov notes, there is an instruction of the Prosecutor General No. 236/7 of August 8, 2011. In this document, the agency recognizes that its employees often unreasonably intervene in the work of NPOs, and to prevent such violations prescribes "as much as possible to use the possibilities of obtaining the necessary information from the available official sources, including the Internet."

On March 21, the head of the St. Petersburg Freedom Freedom of Information, Ivan Pavlov, refused to provide the inspectors with the documents and let them out to inspect the premises. “I, with the lawyers of the Fund, Daria Sukhikh and Evgeny Smirnov, immediately invited this delegation to the meeting room, where we were presented with a letter from the local prosecutor’s office demanding that a huge number of documents,” Pavlov said . “In addition, the employees demanded that they inspect all the offices of our office and question our question“ for what purpose ”for what purpose? We want to understand what we are doing here, but I have something to hide, but this requirement was too much like that of some investigative actions or operational-search measures. The prosecutor demanded that the “mask shows demanded that I give a written explanation, where he suggested to justify the reason for the refusal, which I did. They will probably think about how to hold me responsible for refusing to fulfill the requirements of the prosecutor. "

On Thursday, employees of the prosecutor’s office, the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Tax Service came with a “comprehensive audit” to the Memorial human rights company. "Together with them, the NTV film crew was in a strange way, which tried to shoot a meeting with the prosecutor’s office, asked questions," the Memorial said on Facebook. Later, police officers asked the NTV film crew to leave the premises.

The prosecutor's office came to the "Memorial"

The next day, the employees of the same departments again appeared in the office of a human rights society. “If they checked the Memorial International Society yesterday, then today they came to check the Moscow Memorial, the next week they promised to come to the Memorial human rights center,” the head of the historical, educational and human rights company Arseniy Roginsky. Later, the press service of the Memorial informed Kommersant, that the prosecutors of the prosecutors They promised every day to check one structural unit of the company, which in Russia there are 50. "They even require evidence that we conduct seminars, as we have found documents on the purchase of coffee and drying for them," the human rights activists noted.

The prosecutor's office announced the intention to check from 30 to 100 NPOs in each of the regions, that is, to just several thousand organizations. In St. Petersburg alone, checks are scheduled for a hundred NPOs out of five thousand.

This week after numerous NGO appeals regarding unprecedented mass complex inspections, an emergency meeting of the Permanent Commission for the Development of the NPO of the Presidential Council for Human Rights was held. In addition to scheduled inspections in 13 regions, unscheduled prosecutorial inspections are held, the head of the Agora Pavel Chikov noted at the meeting. According to him, the task of conducting inspections was received in the regions from the Prosecutor General’s Office in February and they will last until April. However, there is no official document confirming such an indication, Chikov noted.

"I have no doubt that the audits are held on the subject of the law on foreign agents, since the inspectors are interested in information about the organization of political activities, the conduct of mass events and sources of financing," Chikov said.

Inspections have the "nature of the All -Russian campaign." This conclusion was reached by participants in the meeting. They prepared an appeal to the Prosecutor General’s Office with an appeal to “stop NPO nightmare” and preparation of the relevant statement of the HRC.

On December 21, 2012, the “Shield and Sword” first of the NPO voluntarily submitted an application to the Ministry of Justice with a request to include it in the list of “foreign agents”. In this way, human rights activists decided to "study the new law from the inside" and "create precedents to protect other NPOs working for the benefit of the inhabitants of Russia." On January 22, 2013, the Ministry of Justice refused to include a “shield and a sword” in the register of “foreign agents”. The department explained its decision by the fact that NPOs conducts human rights, and not political activities. As indicated in the official statement of the ministry, the goals of the organization "comply with the general principles of the protection and protection of human rights and citizen in the Russian Federation, enshrined in the Constitution", "do not contradict national policy and are not aimed at changing it." The officials made this conclusion "based on the general principles and norms of Russian legislation."