UPDATE: European Parliamentarians visit Russia to check pulse of ailing NGO sector
German MEP Rebecca Harms.
Alexei Snigirev
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Organization
“You cannot transpose one idea of freedom from one country to another,” Mikhailov told Bellona Web, comparing the notion 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.
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| (From left to right) Yury Vdovin of Citizens’ Watch and St. Petersburg human rights ombudsman and former member of the ultra nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, Igor Mikhailov. |
| Alexei Snigirev/Bellona |
Organisations from eight different spheres of the civil society sector, representatives of opposition political parties and members of the independent press took parting the roundtable discussion Friday at the end of Harms’ and Kallenbach’s visit (pictrures from the press-conference).
The Russian Federal Registration Service, which is in charge of implementing the controversial 2006 NGO law - widely seen as an instrument to selectively gag critical organisations - refused to meet with the MEPs.
Government human rights officials block dialogue
The remarks of Mikhailov, who is entrusted with ensuring that local government complies with human rights norms, emphasise how difficult discussions of civil society’s rights have become in an increasingly closed and opaque new Russia.
The European Parliament has regularly raised concerns over the mounting difficulties facing independent voices in Russia, and the objective of Harms and Kallenbach’s visit was to give the MEPs a first-hand understanding of the problems facing dozens of Russian civil society and human rights organisations, including Bellona.
Harms and Kallenbach met Thursday with members of St. Petersburg non-governmental and civil society groups and held discussions on Friday morning with the city administration
MEPs concerned over erosion of Russian civil society
Harms said her and Kallenbach’s two-day trip revealed that Russia’s new law on NGOs was having a detrimental impact on the effectiveness of civil society and rights organisations, and human rights groups say their efforts are stymied onerous and arbitrary re-registration bureaucracy
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| (From left to right) MEPs Gisela Kallenbach, Rebecca Harms, and Eivind Hoff of Bellona Brussels. |
| Alexei Snigirev/Bellona |
“I came to St. Petersburg because it seemed to me that in the course of adopting the new law on NGOs and in the process of re-registration of many NGO, it turned out that the work conditions for precisely those of groups of citizens who are working here in Northwest Russia and the Leningrad Oblast on environmental problems has gotten worse,” Harms said.
“On the hardships in work that NGO’s are experiencing, I have also heard from groups that work in the field of defending women’s rights, and other human rights watchdogs,” Harms told reporters.
Harms to push for more European Parliament efforts
Harms said that after she returns to Brussels, she intends to inform the European Parliament and the Russian State Duma about the results of her trip and to facilitate discussion about what she saw and heard on her trip within the framework of the European Parliament.
Federal Registration Bureau bent on ‘liquidation’
Co-chairman of the St. Petersburg based rights watchdog Citizens’ Watch, Yury Vdovin, said that authorities in Russia were bent on “liquidating” civil society organisations.
“From our point of view, the condition of NGOs in St. Petersburg, as in all Russia, is close to catastrophic: It is completely clear that the authorities will take a course of liquidation of NGOs without connections to the authorities.”
In an apparent effort to strike a diplomatic note between NGO participants and the point of view of rights ombudsman Mikhailov, Kallenbach told Bellona Web that: “In some ways, what I hear from NGOs here in St. Petersburg about the difficulties they experience reminds me of the situation in the German Democratic Republic.”
Kallenbach lived in East Germany until its collapse.
“But NGOs can speak their minds freely now,” Kallenbach continued. “That would not have been possible during communism. And that gives me hope.”
Russian government bait and switch
According to the Russian NGO participants of the round table meeting with the MEPs, a dangerous situation has arisen for civil society organisations – the authorities are substituting independent NGOs by replacing them with organisations that imitate their structure.
Under the Putin administration and the increased muzzling of truly critical organisations, numerous government-funded “NGOs” have made an appearance with Kremlin funding. Advertising themselves as rights organisations, they turn out of be little more than government run cells promulgating the government line.
The participants in the meeting noted that in the majority of European countries, special legislation regulating the work of NGOs focus the attention on the tax status of these organisations rather than the content of their mandate. Such organisations serve to distract society at large from the profound crackdown on NGOs that are fighting for governmental transparency.
NGOs in democratic countries also exist for the purpose of giving the public levers of control over the activities of their governments. In Russia, authorities are attempting to affect the strictest control on NGOs instead of guaranteeing their own transparency and accountability before society.
(This report was compiled by members of ERC Bellona in St. Petersburg and Bellona-Europa in Brussels.)
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