Sergey Porter / Vedomosti

The broad supervisory powers of the prosecutor's office do not contradict the Constitution; they are necessary to respond to violations of the law. This consolidated position was voiced yesterday by representatives of the authorities in the Constitutional Court (CC), which is reviewing the provisions of the law "On the Prosecutor's Office" at the request of several non-profit organizations (NPOs).

Human rights activists believe that the lack of legislative regulations for inspections allows the supervisory body to arbitrarily interfere in the activities of public associations. The law allows campaigns to search for incriminating evidence against NGOs, Svetlana Gannushkina, a member of the board of the Memorial society (one of the applicants), explained to the court: when they came to inspect Memorial, the prosecutors refused to explain what exactly they were looking for. In 2013, the Prosecutor General's Office initiated a large-scale inspection of NGOs, as a result of which dozens of them received representations demanding that they be added to the list of foreign agents. Many of them had previously been inspected by the Ministry of Justice, which found no violations.

It doesn't matter what they were looking for if violations were eventually found, argued the President's representative to the Constitutional Court, Mikhail Krotov. He sees the NGO's appeal to the Constitutional Court as only an attempt to challenge the results of the inspections. The prosecutor's office is the only supervisory body that has universal supervisory powers, supported Krotov by State Duma deputy Dmitry Vyalkin. Different departments inspect within the limits of their competence, and only the prosecutor's office, as it has historically been, has the right to control everyone. Accordingly, it requires universal means to ensure the rule of law, the deputy argued. He recalled that in recent years, Yuri Chaika's department has already lost a significant part of its powers, and supervision is its main function now. Other departments sometimes do abuse inspections, admitted Senator Alexei Alexandrov. But not the prosecutor's office - it has a special constitutional and legal status and supervises "in order to ensure the rule of law." The possibility of duplicating functions during inspections was unanimously denied by representatives of the prosecutor's office and the Ministry of Justice: following the inspection of the Agora association (one of the applicants), not only the NPO was punished, but also the Ministry of Justice, which had previously inspected it, said a representative of the prosecutor's office.

The human rights activists were supported only by the Presidential Council for Human Rights (HRC). HRC member Ilya Shablinsky recalled that the applicants are asking to assess the constitutionality of not only the norm itself, but also the established practice. And in practice, inspections of NGOs easily turn into a means of obstructing their activities. Some organizations were inspected five times: if they tried to appeal the results of one inspection, a new one would immediately begin. "Coming to inspect "in general" in order to find at least something - this approach seems unconstitutional to us," Shablinsky stated. The Constitutional Court will issue a decision on the case in a closed session within a few weeks.

The authorities stood up for the prosecutor's office