22/12/2005 New NGO legislation introduces rule of bureaucracy, says expert
The Council of the Russian Duma has today decided to hold the third reading of the draft law toughening control over non-profit-making and nongovernmental organisations (NPO and NGO) tomorrow. No changes can be introduced to the bill at this stage. If the law is passed tomorrow, it may be approved by the Federation Council as soon as the beginning of next week and signed by the president of Russia by late this year, Mr Lev Levinson, an expert with the Human Rights Institute and Public Examination Institute who also worked in the lower house of the Russian parliament for a long time, has told Caucasian Knot's correspondent.
"The improvements in the bill on non-profit-making organisation which the Duma passed yesterday in the second reading are only as compared with the version passed in the first reading, but by no means as compared with the effective version of the laws to which the amendments are introduced. Toughening, enhanced control measures and various policing contrivances go everywhere there," Mr Lev Levinson analyses the current text of the notorious bill.
"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," the expert thinks.
"The bill provides for deprivation of the right to association with regard to prisoners. It is clear that this is a blow directly on the prisoner Khodorkovsky and his Open Russia," thinks the human rights defender. "This is an absolutely unconstitutional limitation on rights because the penality of an act is only defined by the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and we do have a punishment in the Criminal Code such as prohibition to carry out certain activities. However, it is only applied individually, allowing of the public danger of a criminal act, not sweepingly to all prisoners."
"The draft law provides for the introduction of a tough mechanism of control which is difficult to comply with and which entrusts the Russian Registration Agency with inadmissibly discretionary powers. Controlling agencies, first of all offices of the Registration Agency, are actually entrusted with the right of day-to-day and sweeping control over NGO activities. NGOs themselves are forced by the law to submit reports on their operations, achievement of their goals and objectives, and spending to the Registration Agency. The regularity and form of such reports will be determined by the government," Mr Levinson says.
In his view, the Registration Agency thus develops into a "super-agency comparable with State Drugs Control as to its senselessness and harmfulness. A new bureaucratic monster has emerged from nowhere."
"The bill in question provides a lot of opportunities to close, prohibit the operations of an NGO. It is quite easy to close a public association even now. Now this is extended to all NGOs. Any two violations of any regulation, even concerning fire safety, or one grave violation will lead to the Registration Agency or the prosecutor's office applying to a court of law to close this same NGO. Meanwhile, a grave violation is not defined in any way, it is up to officials to decide," says the expert.
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