Moscow authorities demanded that the Civic Assistance Committee leave its office

The Moscow City Property Department demanded that the human rights committee leave the premises allocated to human rights activists in 2011. Mediazona was informed about this by the organization itself.

Human rights activists were informed of the termination of the contract for free use, which they concluded in 2011. The organization was required to leave its premises in Moscow within a month.

“At the suggestion of the president, and the president in 2011 was [Dmitry] Medvedev, we were given this premises. Five years later, the contract was ending, and I turned to the landlord, Mosimushchestvo, with a request to extend the lease. To which I received an answer that, since the lease had ended, but neither party expressed a desire to terminate it, the lease automatically became indefinite. And we lived like this quite calmly,” the chairman of the organization, Svetlana Gannushkina, told Mediazona.

In 2019-2020, human rights activists were invited to discuss the issue of concluding a new treaty. “To which I answered them exactly what they answered me in 2016. I wrote that since our agreement is indefinite, I don’t see any particular need for it <…> I associate this with the whole general trend of destruction of civil society in Russia. I think we can still fight legally,” Gannushkina added.

After that, everything “calmed down” for two years, but now the Moscow authorities demanded that human rights activists leave the premises.

The Civic Assistance Committee was founded in 1990. The charity helps refugees and migrants. In 2015, the Ministry of Justice included her in the register of “foreign agents.”