Challenge to civil society: Russia's amended law on noncommercial organizations

Original publisher: Washington, DC : U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, [2007] OCLC Number: (OCoLC)694733452 Subject: Non-governmental organizations -- Law and legislation -- Russia. Excerpt: ... required to register according to the NGO law. Although the law makes a further distinction between removal from the register in the case of " affiliate " or " representative " offices, and liquidation in the case of " branch " offices of foreign NGOs ( and all other domestic Russian NGOs ), the end result for all organizations which run afoul of the law is principally the same. That is, the NGO is no longer able to operate legally on the territory of the Russian Federation, and must again go through the entire registration or notification procedure to re-qualify. Although a key feature of the NGO law, these distinctions are minimized in the following analysis to enable a sharper focus on the law's overarching potential effects for Russian civil society as a whole. III. Key Provisions of the Amended 1996 Law on Noncommercial Organizations A. Applicability to Religious Organizations Article 1 ( 4 ) of the amended NGO law specifies that articles 13-19, 21-23, and 28-30 shall not be applicable to religious organizations. According to information obtained from the FRS, articles 13.1 and 13.2, introduced by the January 2006 amendments, also are not binding on religious organizations. Based on these exclusions, most of the law's registration, organization and liquidation procedures effectively do not apply to religious organizations in Russia. That said, as will be seen below - and despite claims of many Russian officials to the contrary - some of the most onerous features of the amended NGO law do in fact apply to religious organizations. In particular, article 32, which establishes exhaustive reporting obligations for NGOs and extensive state powers to intervene in NGO activities, is applicable to religious organizations. Moreover, the law is silent on wh...