Deputies separated agents from spies
The State Duma has granted non-profit organizations (NPOs) engaged in political activity in Russia with foreign funding the status of “foreign agents.” All Duma factions agreed to this wording, except for A Just Russia. Supporters of the new law have been reproached for illiteracy and attempts to blindly copy foreign experience onto Russia’s specific soil.
The bill tightening control over foreign-funded non-profit organizations (NPOs) passed its first reading in the State Duma on Friday. Work on it is to be completed as early as next week. The restrictions will only affect those organizations that engage in political activity. This definition will also cover attempts to influence government decisions, including through shaping public opinion.
Under the draft, such NPOs will be entered into a special register of organizations “performing the functions of a foreign agent.” Refusal to provide information to the Ministry of Justice will result in a fine of up to 1 million rubles. Particularly persistent violators also face up to 3 years in prison.
Presenting the amendments at the Duma session, one of their authors, the head of the Security Committee Irina Yarovaya, assured that the new rules are fully in line with “international standards of civic control.” “The bill is not restrictive; on the contrary, it is designed to make the work of NPOs in Russia as open and transparent as possible,” the deputy emphasized.
While praising the new law, Yarovaya did not mention a word about the sharp reaction the scandalous document has provoked among civil society organizations themselves, as well as in the Presidential Council for Human Rights and the Public Chamber. The authors of the document seem not to have been frightened, apparently, even by the opposition’s promises to ensure they are included on the “Magnitsky list.” “Is it all just water off a duck’s back to you?” SR Gennady Gudkov tried to quip in this regard. But in response, he heard yet another batch of laudatory epithets in defense of the bill.
At the same time, Yarovaya defended with particular zeal the provision of the document that confers the status of “foreign agents” on NPOs. “It’s like when we get acquainted — we tell each other our names,” the head of the committee argued. “So it is here: present your business card, so that it is immediately clear to everyone who is interacting with whom.” Ms. Yarovaya also disagreed with those who tried to draw a parallel between foreign agents and spies. “If you act openly and honestly, you have nothing to fear or be ashamed of,” the deputy said.
Nevertheless, LDPR member Maxim Shingarkin proposed that the wording of the law be softened for the second reading by replacing “foreign agents” with “international agents”: “I myself am a member of international environmental organizations and consider that prestigious and honorable, but somehow I don’t want to be called a foreign agent.”
And SR Ilya Ponomarev outright reproached United Russia members for simple ignorance of foreign languages. “‘Foreign agent’ in English means ‘another representative,’ ‘foreign spy,’” Ponomarev translated. This provoked a storm of indignation from United Russia’s Andrey Isaev, who tried to prove his profound knowledge of English by shouting from the floor. “Yes, we know that you are a representative of the international anarchist movement, for you English is your native tongue,” Ponomarev continued to “press” Isaev. Among other things, the SR, who himself, incidentally, travels to Washington and London almost like it were his dacha, also reproached United Russia members for blindly copying foreign experience. “You are copying two U.S. laws: one from the mid-1930s, when they had to fight German agents, and the other from the 1950s, when they fought communism in the era of McCarthyism,” the deputy said.
The Communists did not take that as a stone cast in their garden. “We see nothing so bad in the law,” Communist Party deputy Vladimir Kashin spoke in support of the new rules. “On the contrary, we must guard our Motherland like a shrine from this darkness of organizations that have flooded into Russia in recent years under plausible pretexts, infiltrated state structures and are ready at hour X to act according to instructions.”
Moreover, as the Duma assured, the law will not create additional barriers for organizations engaged in charity and public affairs.
Maria Shuvalova
Read more: https://www.rosbalt.ru/main/2012/07/06/1008192.html
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