23 December 2005, 18:51
NGO leaders hope for president
"It is not just a crime, it is a mistake." Mr Alexander Auzan, director general of the People's Assembly foundation and president of the national project Public Accord, used this utterance of the prominent French politician Talleyrand to comment to Caucasian Knot's correspondent on the passing in the third reading today of the law toughening control of non-profit-making and nongovernmental organisations (NPOs and NGOs).
"This law fails to achieve those objectives which the potential customer, the president of the Russian Federation, would like to achieve, and in doing so, it creates a huge number of negative external effects. Therefore, I say that this is not the end yet. The Federation Council is, of course, a zero chance that the law might not be passed, with the existing political regime. However, I would fight for the president not to sign this law. And after the president, one should look for potential to apply to the Constitutional Court," Mr Auzan thinks.
"This law establishes a reverse order. In normal countries, the civil society controls officials, but we have it on the contrary. This law is a slipknot around the neck of the civil society without which the state cannot function properly. I would like to hope that the president will not sign it," Ms Liudmila Alekseyeva, Chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, told Caucasian Knot's correspondent. According to her, earlier today she had a meeting with Ms Ella Pamfilova, Chairwoman of the Civil Society Development and Human Rights Council for the Russian president, at which Ms Pamfilova promised to ask Mr Putin not to sign draft law No 233364-4.
"Considering that formulae in this law are not always accurate, this will provide a basis for arbitrariness. As some provisions are to be interpreted by the government, there is a risk that the provisions infringing on the position of public organisations which had been removed by the second reading may now emerge again in the form of government directives. The procedure and frequency of reports to the registration authority have not been defined yet. If these are to be submitted, for example, as we spend, we will simply get drowned in papers," Public Verdict Foundation Director Natalia Taubina tells Caucasian Knot's correspondent. "The law prohibits prisoners from being founders of public organisations. One of our sponsors, Open Russia, will now face the dilemma of either ceasing its activities, or re-registering without the founder Khodorkovsky. Accordingly, this will also affect our work."
"We as participants in the protest campaign Days of United Action in Protection of NGOs are not very much, mildly put, pleased with the Duma's passing of the NGO bill today. The thing that irritates me most is that we must report on the plane of content of our operations under this law. The state says openly, 'We want to know what you do and if we don't like it, we will close you,'" Mr Dmitry Kokorev, one of the initiators of the protest campaign of public organisations against the passing of the law on the activities of non-profit-making organisations and a fellow with the Joint Action Institute, expresses his indignation.
"The conceptual fault of this law is that the area of freedom is eliminated which has to date been protected by the 1996 law 'On non-profit-making organisations.' All NGOs are facing the need of registration upon permission instead of registration upon notification, and they are facing sweeping control of bureaucracy. The law encloses the entire non-profit-making sector with barbed wire. This is the main, all-through keynote of the bill. A new version of the law 'On non-profit-making organisations' is being passed actually," Mr Lev Levinson, an expert with the Human Rights Institute, told Caucasian Knot's correspondent.
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Author: Vyacheslav Feraposhkin, CK correspondent
