The authorities of Yakutia will eliminate contradictions in the coordination of actions after an appeal from OVD-Info and Memorial

The authorities of Yakutia will eliminate contradictions in the rules for approving public actions after an appeal from OVD-Info and the Memorial Human Rights Center.

In mid-May, OVD-Info and the Memorial Human Rights Center contacted the department pointing out a number of contradictions in the regional legislation on freedom of assembly.

The prosecutor's office conducted an inspection and reported that the head of the republic had developed a draft decree that provides for:

• Termination of the decree “On the authorized executive body of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), to which notification of a public event is submitted”;
• The decree “On the structure of executive bodies of state power of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)” excludes from the powers of the Ministry of External Relations and Peoples’ Affairs of the Republic of Sakha the functions of coordinating public actions.

As a result of the changes, notification of the action will have to be submitted to the Administration of the Head of Yakutia and the Government of Yakutia, which is already enshrined in regional regulations.

“These regulatory changes will eliminate confusion for people who want to host a public event. At the same time, in regulating the procedure for approving shares in Yakutia, other problems remain due to the requirements of the regional law: when coordinating with municipal authorities, it is not known to which level of municipal administration a notification should be submitted; if the action is planned on the territory of several municipalities, then you will have to submit not one, but several notifications. Previously, a similar problem was identified in 18 regions,” say OVD-Info lawyers.

According to the supervisory agency, on June 1, the draft of the new decree was agreed upon with the prosecutor’s office, and it is “at the signing stage,” however, at the time of writing the news, the document had not yet been published on the website of the head of Yakutia.

30.06 The head of Yakutia signed a decree eliminating contradictions in the rules for approving public events in the republic. Information about this appeared on the website of the President of the Republic.

• Since 2009, there have been five changes in the republic to which notification of actions had to be submitted. With the change of the authorized authority, the address where the organizers must physically deliver the notification changed each time.
• In April, OVD-Info and Memorial appealed to the Prosecutor General's Office in connection with the contradiction of a number of regional laws on rallies with the federal law. Regional legislators are authorized to establish only the “procedure for filing” notification. Nevertheless, in 5 regions the law included additional requirements for the content of the notification, and in 11 regions - additional requirements for its execution.
• The violations were revealed during the work on the report "The Art of Ban 2", which shows how regional notification rules make it difficult to coordinate actions. The original data has been published in the public domain.