The Ministry of Justice has again updated the register of “foreign agents”.
This time the list included:
- Stanislav Kozlovsky is a scientist-psychologist, an active participant in the Russian-language Wikipedia and ex-director of Wikimedia RU;
- Anton Kartavin - deputy of the Novosibirsk City Council from the “Novosibirsk 2020 Coalition”;
- Nikita Sokolov - historian, deputy executive director of the Yeltsin Center, Memorial activist;
- Oleg Orlov - human rights activist, co-chairman of the Memorial Center for the Protection of Human Rights;
- Mikhail Chimarov - Memorial activist from Veliky Novgorod;
- Sergei Stepanov is a Tambov journalist and Memorial activist.
Among the reasons for inclusion in the register, the department named an anti-war position and the dissemination of materials from other “foreign agents.”
In October, Oleg Orlov was fined 150 thousand rubles in a criminal case for repeated discrediting of the Russian army (Part 1 of Article 280.3 of the Criminal Code). The reason was an article by a human rights activist “They wanted fascism. They got it." In November, the prosecutor's office asked to commute his sentence to three years in prison.
On February 5, the Chairman of the Novgorod Memorial, Mikhail Chimarov, was fired from the headquarters of Boris Nadezhdin after being recognized as a “foreign agent.” This was reported by the Memorial Society.
- The legislation on “foreign agents” is becoming stricter every year. On December 1, 2022, the law “On control over the activities of persons under foreign influence” came into force, as well as numerous legislative amendments to “foreign agency” regulation. You can read about the list of “affiliated persons”, new registers and other innovations in the law on “foreign agents” in the analysis of OVD-Info .
- In addition, Vladimir Putin signed a law on imprisonment for a term of up to five years for “foreign agents” who were brought to justice twice in a year for violating the procedure for the activities of a “foreign agent” (Article 19.34 of the Administrative Code).
- In the fall of 2021, OVD-Info launched the Inoteka project. We explore the practice of applying laws on “foreign agents”, talk about their impact on civil society and specific people, initiate discussions with experts and suggest ways of possible changes. In December 2021, together with the Center for the Protection of Media Rights, we began to provide legal support to people and organizations that were included in the registers of “foreign agents.”