November 9, 2006 | Read Time: 4 minutes
Several dozen foreign nonprofit groups remain barred from working in Russia while authorities consider whether to allow them to operate, in keeping with a new law that even a Kremlin adviser criticized last week for its red tape.
At least 57 nonprofit groups from countries in the Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America awaited word about the status of their operations some two weeks after the deadline expired requiring them to be re-registered. Groups that were not re-registered were forced to suspend their activities immediately under the law, which has been criticized as potentially crippling to the country’s nascent civil society.
Initially 77 of the 185 foreign nonprofit groups that submitted applications were suspended, including many engaged throughout the world in promoting democracy and protecting human rights. Since then, nearly two dozen nonprofit groups have been approved.
Among those that now may resume their activities are the National Democratic Institute and the International Republic Institute, both of which the Kremlin has accused of helping instigate the revolutions that toppled governments in Ukraine and Georgia.
Other nonprofit groups that have fallen out of favor with the Kremlin, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, are effectively shuttered while they await approval.
Another organization that has been refused registration is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which has been working here since 1992. The failure to be re-registered is surprising because similar organizations, such as the Ford Foundation, were approved.
“We have no reason to believe that there is a problem with our registration papers,” said Andrew Solomon, director of public affairs at MacArthur. “While we filed our registration paperwork in advance of the deadline, some organizations filed even earlier.”
‘Red Tape’
At least 28 applications from nonprofit groups in the United States were still being evaluated as of late last month. The Federal Registration Service, a division of the Ministry of Justice, would not provide the names of the organizations under scrutiny.
Five nonprofit groups from Great Britain, four each from Germany and Norway, and two each from Canada, France, and Italy were also being vetted by the registration service.
Nongovernmental organizations last week heard empathic words from an unlikely source, Ella Pamfilova, an adviser to President Vladimir Putin. Mr. Putin has characterized foreign nonprofit groups as fronts for spies and terrorists, as well as foreign governments trying to sow domestic unrest.
“The law creates so much red tape that many organizations can’t cope,” Ms. Pamfilova, chairwoman of the president’s Council of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights, told The Moscow Times.
“Considering the government’s crackdown on NGOs,” she said, “it is not surprising that they are experiencing difficulties.”
The Russian government insists that “no problems with the re-registration of private non-commercial organizations ever existed, and do not exist,” according to a statement on the Justice Ministry’s Web site. It says that nonprofit groups often submit documents with mistakes.
But interviews with representatives of foreign nonprofit groups here show that authorities have been meticulous — some used terms like “overzealous,” and “nitpicking” — in adhering to the letter of the law. For example, organizations have had to provide the passport numbers of their founders — regardless of when the group was founded, and whether a founder is alive.
The government, however, appears to be living up to the pledge on its Web site indicated by the word “corruption” inside a red circle with a slash through it: None of the staff members of nonprofit groups interviewed said that they had been solicited for bribes or otherwise pressured by officials in charge of the registration process.
The U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation, an organization in Arlington, Va., was among the groups that lost its registration temporarily, but received permission to operate about a week later.
“Of course we were nervous, we were earnestly nervous,” said Sergey Egorov, a program coordinator for the foundation’s office here. “But everything went smoothly. We expected a long delay. Maybe we were lucky.”
Detailed Information
Initially representatives of foreign governments and nonprofit groups feared that the law would be used to shut down private organizations altogether.
So far, the process has been limited to “all of the classic hallmarks of an intimate encounter with the Russian bureaucracy in its fullest form,” said Steve Solnick, who represents the Ford Foundation here.
Last week, foreign nonprofit groups were required to submit detailed plans of the activities scheduled for 2007. By the end of the year, they must submit detailed financial reports of activities, and continue to do so on a quarterly basis beginning next year.
“It took six pages to create the Ford Foundation in 1936,” Mr. Solnick said. “And it took us over 100 pages to re-register a representative office here that had been in existence reasonably successfully, and without controversy, for 10 years.”
