April 15th predicted to bring death and taxes to Russian NGOs

Part of: Russian NGO law , Russian legal issues
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Russian NGOs are racing to meet the Kremlin’s re-registration deadline or face termination.
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With the April 15th deadline for non-governmental organizations in Russia to submit reports for their activities in 2007 to the Federal Registration Service, an interregional association of human rights associations predicts “tens of thousands” of NGOs will be closed across the country. Charles Digges, 11/04-2008 Russian lawyers' groups have opened hotlines to help organisations wend their way through onerous maze of documents required by the authorities. The European Union, meanwhile, is gearing up for hard talks with Moscow on what it sees as a corrosive factor to Russian civil society.

Pavel Chikov of the interregional AGORA organisation in Kazan, west of Moscow, said in a telephone interview that the next several months will see a bottle neck in Russia’s already groaning court system as NGOs fight the Russian Federal Registration Service, which oversees the registration of social organizations in Russia, over findings that will cease their activities.

Olga Krivonos, a human rights lawyer with Bellona’s St. Petersburg offices agreed with Chikov’s gloomy assessment in a telephone interview, saying that the new bureaucratic conditions for NGOs make it nearly impossible to fill out documentation such that it is not vulnerable to an attack by the Federal Registration Service.
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Bellona St. Petersburg legal adviser Olga Krivonos.
Nils Bøhmer/Bellona

Pål Skedsmo, a research fellow with the Oslo’s Fridtjof Nansen Institute, who has studied the ramifications of Russia’s NGO legislation, was amazed by the number organisations Chikov estimated would be impacted by this year’s re-registration.

“The Russian authorities usually go after organisations they think cause ‘trouble,’ so my initial response to this estimation is ‘wow,’” said Skedsmo in a telephone interview.

“This sounds like a lot of organisations and this would draw what would be too much attention from the West.”

The new NGO law came into force in January 2006, and has since it’s inception been widely observed both domestically and abroad to be one of the Kremlin’s most effective tools to stamp out political dissent – something that helped usher Dmitry Medvedev, out-going President Vladimir Putin’s hand picked successor, into the Kremlin, where he will be sworn in as president May 7th.
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Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin’s hand-picked heir to the Russian presidency takes power May7th - with Putin as his prime minister.
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Medvedev – who needed no further endorsement than Putin and the cooperation of a compliant state media – campaigned on vanilla promises of easing conditions for Russia’s small businesses, and has remained mum on civil liberties issues.

Cracks in the Federal Registration Service
One possible light in this dark forecast is the reported conclusion by many members of the Federal Registration Service itself during a meeting Wednesday that many of its requirements are too stiff. Those who were present and interviewed by Bellona Web admitted that the service “was far too selective” in its allegedly random audits of non-governmental organizations.

The sources, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, also said the service is finally considering publicizing all documents necessary for re-registration.

Registration service head ‘just shrugs his shoulders’
But the service “is hardly a democracy,” one official noted and said the critiques hardly received a warm reception from Dmitry Yermak, the head of the Federal Registration Service.
The official in the new bureaucracy said: "Yermak just shrugged his shoulders when we discussed these possibilities, and said he’d only received about 100 complaints in 2007.”

“In reality, the service denied registration to 11,000 organisations last year, and that makes a bad impression here in Russia and for other countries as well,” said the official.
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MEPs Gisela Kallenbach (left) and Rebecca Harms speak with Bellona Europa policy advisor Eivind Hoff at a press conference in St. Petersburg in February.
Alexei Snigirev/Bellona

EU Intervention
So concerned is the international community over the future state of Russia’s NGO and civil society organisation sector that the European Union will use it’s biannual human rights dialog with Russia, to be hosted in Slovenia on April 17th , as a rostrum for its frustrations about the sword hanging over Russia’s NGO community.

The Federal Registration official said the service was especially hard on organisations that lacked federal status and operated in territories that they are not officially registered in, something European observers have not missed in their own critiques.

“That means, in general terms, nearly every non-governmental organisation could be liquidated on that pretext alone,” the registration official said.

“One activist travels from one region to meet with another an they have violated the law.”

Critisism a bitter pill for Russian bureaucrats
German Members of European Parliament (MEPs) Rebecca Harms and Gisela Kallenbach returned to Brussels after a getting a dismal inside look facilitated by Bellona at the St. Petersburg human rights scene in February. Yet even St. Petersburg’s Human Rights ombudsman, Igor Mikhhailov, derided European interested in the NGO law.
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Former ultranationalist politician come St. Petersburg human rights ombudsman, Igor Mikhailov.
Alexei Snigirev/Bellona

A former member of the ironically named ultra–nationalist Liberal Democratic Party led by antic bigot Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Mikhailov said during the MEPs’ visit: “You cannot transpose one idea of freedom from one country to another,” and said the notion was comparable to that of differing national customs about where one should place one’s shoes.

“What is right in Africa may not be right in Russia,” he said.

Tax day with a death penalty
The April 15th deadline resembles the anxieties felt on tax day in western countries – which is incidentally April 15th in the United States – and adds uncertainty for Russian NGOs that one forgotten dot over an “i” or a single uncrossed “t” in the reams of documents they are expected to submit under the NGO law can mean immediate and arbitrary liquidation followed by months of litigation.

In anticipation of the last minute melee Russian organisations will be struggling in as they fill out mountains of documentation, a non-profit legal hotline has been set up Human Rights Resource Centre (HRRC) of St. Petersburg and AGORA.

Legal hotlines working to help and document abuses
The hours of the hotline, however, are limited to 2 to 4 pm and will only route calls to one of four lawyers in St. Petersburg, Saratov, Krasnodar, or Chita. A website is also supported by AGORA and the HRRC is at www.openinform.ru/consult/pursuit.

Bellona’s Krivonos said other consortiums of lawyers are also running similar hotlines in 17 regions throughout Russia with longer hours and more detailed consultations.

The hotline services will primarily help NGOs navigate the bureaucracy. But their more loaded and less high profile purpose is to help record violations of the NGO law perpetrated by the Federal Registration Service, and refer organisations to legal aid in the “eventual event of their closure,” said Chikov.

A message advertising one of the hotlines that was put out by the Kazan Human Rights Centre reads: "In especially difficult cases, when the rights of an NGO may need to be defended in court, such
help will be provided."

Krivonos commented wryly that: “These are the results of the new bureaucracy – thousands of organisations stand to be liquidated by this process.”

Bellona’s Russia offices
She said Bellona’s Russian offices and St. Petersburg and Murmansk – both of which successfully passed so-called months-long spot check “controls,” or audits, that the Federal Registration Service conducts under its new mandate – are in good condition to weather the re-registration process.

“We have filled out all out documentation and checked all the right boxes,” she said. But she added that: “This process is entirely arbitrary and authorities can find fault with even perfect applications.”

This was vividly illustrated by Bellona St. Petersburg’s own experience when it was flagged over the summer for alleged tax evasion by Federal Registration Authorities for not reporting “advertising revenues” in exchange for sponsorship it received from the Dutch and British consulates for education programmes.

Such funding is routinely supplied to local organisation by consulates throughout the world, and diplomatic missions ask only in return that they be publicly thanked. When Bellona did this, it was cited for advertising the consulates and the case was referred to tax authorities.

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