Lyudmila Alekseeva, chief of Moscow Helsinki Group
Photo: Ilya Pitalev
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Over 600 NGOs Closed in Russia This Year
Russia’s Federal Registration Service has initiated winding-up for over 600 public organizations since the amendments to Nongovernmental Organization Act took effect, said the report of Interregional Group of Right Defenders, blaming on the registration authority the biased treatment of NGOs.
Experts of Voronezh Interregional Group of Right Defenders promulgated statistics of NGO’s winding-up by court award in 2007. In eight regions of Russia that were covered by the survey, over 600 NGOs were crossed out of the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, which actually meant nearly complete termination of their activities.
In 2001, all non-profit and public organizations of Russia were entered into the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. Once registered, they are to annually confirm they proceed with activities by April 15. But the NGO Act was toughened in 2006, and only 216,000 of roughly 500,000 registered NGOs proved able to meet the deadline this year. In the next move, territorial branches of Federal Registration Service set to filing the suits to exclude NGOs from that register. Nearly all their claims were sustained by courts.
In many cases, the experts concluded, the actions of Federal Registration Service could be viewed as crackdown on NGOs that were working but unwanted by local authorities.
”The statistics for Russia haven’t been compiled yet,” said Lyudmila Alekseeva, chief of Moscow Helsinki Group, “but it is clear already that big numbers of public organizations are being dissolved in Russia under the procedures given by the colleagues.” “The amendments to NGO Act were targeted at destroying any unwanted organization,” Alekseeva emphasized.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Aug. 20, 2007
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