The leaders of some of Russia’s largest nongovernmental organizations raised their concerns about a Kremlin crackdown during a meeting Wednesday with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Kerry, who was wrapping up a two-day visit, met with the NGO representatives at Spaso House, the Moscow residence of U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, before flying to Rome later in the day, the State Department said.

“We spoke about the prosecution of NGOs,” veteran rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva told reporters as she left Spaso House with fellow veteran activist Lev Ponomaryov.

“He was impressed with our stories,” she said about Kerry, according to Interfax.

She said the meeting did not address  the anti-Kremlin protests associated with Bolotnaya Ploshchad or the Magnitsky Act, which bars Russian officials implicated in human rights violations from traveling to the U.S.

NGOs have come under increasing pressure after the Justice Ministry ordered that hundreds be searched in recent weeks to check their compliance with a November law that requires those that receive funding from abroad and are engaged in political activity to register as “foreign agents.”

Alexeyeva is among the NGO leaders who have refused to register under the law, which she and other critics see as a government attempt to smear the reputation of critical NGOs.

The deputy head of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, Tatyana Lokshina, said ahead of the meeting that she wanted to talk with Kerry about an overall crackdown on Russian civil society in the past year.

“The amendments to the legislation infringe fundamental rights,” Lokshina told Interfax.

According to her, more than 250 NGOs have been checked and 30 were told to register as foreign agents or cease their political activity, including independent elections watchdog Golos.

Levada Center, the independent pollster, denied a report in Izvestia this week that said it too had been asked to register as a foreign agent.

The measures have outraged rights activists both in Russia and abroad. The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner, Nils Muiznieks, slammed the ”foreign agents” law and voiced doubts about the need to conduct the searches during talks with Foreign Ministry Sergei Lavrov and Prosecutor General Yury Chaika last month.

He said at the time yhat he was particularly concerned with the law’s wording, which he said could be interpreted to mean that all human rights activity was political.

In an interview published in Vedomosti on Wednesday, Muiznieks said the checks were paralyzing the work of the whole nonprofit sector. But Russian authorities, he said, were unlikely to react to his complaints.

Kerry’s two-day visit to Moscow is his first to Russia after his appointment as the U.S. secretary of state in February. In addition to the meeting with civil society representatives, Kerry held  wide-ranging talks with President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

April 15, 2013

U R G E N T

Honorable Senator Benjamin Cardin
Honorable Congressman Christopher Smith
Co-chairs of the Helsinki Commission of the American Congress (Committee on Foreign Affairs)

Dear co-chairs of the Helsinki Commission:

Alarming information about the escalation of wide attacks on the Russian NGOs comes every day from Moscow. Almost all powerful inspection departments on the federal and local levels (like Security Service, Prosecutors’ offices, divisions of the Interior Ministry, even Fire Departments, Taxes, Customs, Border Troops, etc.) have been thrown on central Russian and International NGOs (like “Memorial,” Moscow Helsinki Group, Human Rights Movement, “Golos,” Committee Against Tortures, – about 700 according to President Putin) in spite of recent planned examinations. We know of 222 groups across Russia that have been raided. They include religious organizations as well as pro-democracy and human right groups. The religious groups include Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Jews and Muslims. It is a concerted effort by the Putin government to destroy all such groups by applying the iron hand of the state. Raiders even came to the private apartments of the chairs of important NGOs, like Committee Against Tortures. The explanation was delivered by President Putin, – how the new law about “foreign agents” was to be implemented. In an interview to the German mass-media on April 4, 2013, he said that Russian NGOs received about 1 billion dollars during the last 4 months for “their political activity inside the country.” At the same time these NGOs “violated” the new law – they did not recognize themselves as “foreign agents.”

Everybody knows this government is deathly afraid of free expression and the possibility of true democracy and accountability for violations of human rights. Anti-American rhetoric has become part of the official foreign policy. The economic situation is very poor in Russia but its finances are investing in military equipment. Russian diplomats reject almost all Western initiatives for settling peace and stability. Persecution of the honest NGOs will inhibit the development of public society in Russia and deprive the world of truthful information. The purpose of the raids is to spread fear again all over the society. We are witnesses to the micro-Stalinization of all spheres of freedom, culture, and science. We also see the first attempts to undermine the Helsinki Final Act. The key is to help Russian NGOs to survive and to continue to operate. We need to stop their suffocation by the Putin regime.

The UCSJ has been working in the former Soviet Union since 1970 and up until 1991 was the voice of the Refuseniks. UCSJ consistently advocated for freedom of emigration throughout this time. For the last 20 years, we have been the voice of democratic forces and have fought against anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia, working as the bridge between Russian and Western public societies.

We hope that your distinguished Commission can inspire the American public and authorities to help Russian (as well as other parts of the FSU) NGOs to continue their important work. In addition, we hope you will influence the American administration to support NGO protection. As the first organizational measures we propose:

• to establish a Crisis Support Group (CSG) in Washington D.C. to coordinate efforts to support the integrity of Russian NGOs and their leadership. We are ready to open our offices in Washington DC to aid in this effort;
• to run special hearings about the Russian fulfillment of the Helsinki Human Rights Documents
• (American Congress, autumn, 2013) with the participation of several Russian NGOs leaders;
• to ask the State Department to include in the Magnitsky List the names of officials who persecute
• NGOs in the present crisis;
• to inform the European Union members about American measures and invite them to join it.

Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,

Larry Lerner

President

The Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia’s oldest human rights organization, on Thursday became the latest NGO inspected in a massive government campaign that has hit hundreds of non-state groups in 25 regions and is unprecedented in post-Soviet Russia, a rights leader said.

Prosecutors and Justice Ministry officials on Thursday showed up at the headquarters of the Moscow Helsinki Group, where they asked the organization’s veteran leader, 85-year-old Lyudmila Alexeyeva, to turn over internal documents.

“They’ve inspected everybody else, and now they’ve come to us,” she told Interfax.

One has to go back to the Great Terror of 1937-38, when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin closed all foreign organizations, to find a historical analogy to the current situation, presidential human rights councilman Sergei Krivenko said at a news conference on Thursday.

Leading Russian and foreign NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, and Transparency International and Memorial have been among those inspected, raising fears of a crackdown. Officials have accused some NGOs that criticize the government of being foreign-backed puppets.

President Vladimir Putin said the searches would check whether NGOs were following the law and, in an apparent nod to critics’ concerns, asked human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin to keep the process under control. “We wouldn’t want any excesses,” he said, Interfax reported.

The month-old operation has also attracted international condemnation and threatened to strain relations with Germany, France and the United States, some of whose NGOs have been searched.

“Damage to German-Russian relations has already been done. Germany was very irritated by the inspections at two German NGOs,” said Jens Siegert, head of the Moscow office of the Boell foundation, a German NGO for civil society development.

Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to discuss the issue with Putin next month during his visit to the Hannover Messe industrial fair, said Ruprecht Polenz, foreign affairs committee head in Germany’s lower house of parliament, Die Welt reported.

The U.S. and French governments have both asked for an explanation for the searches.

A senior Russian diplomat said the checks were legal and rejected international criticism.

“Unfortunately, this criticism is completely unfounded. We haven’t heard any serious arguments from our colleagues,” said Konstantin Dolgov, the Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, Interfax reported Thursday.

A wide array of NGOs, from women’s rights groups to environmental advocates to Roman Catholic parishes, have seen their premises searched by various agencies since the beginning of the month.

The inspections are “artillery preparation” before the government moves to enforce a controversial law that requires certain NGOs that receive foreign financing to register as “foreign agents,” said Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora human rights group and a presidential human rights councilman.

NGOs have boycotted, and not a single one has registered under the foreign agents law, which went into effect in November, Chikov told journalists in response to a question from The Moscow Times.

Memorial, for instance, will not refuse “prestigious” foreign grants in the future, Krivenko said. “Our parents taught us not to lie, and so we refuse to call ourselves ‘foreign agents,’” he said.

Russian NGOs received about 19 billion rubles ($613 million) in foreign funds in 2011, Chikov said.

The Prosecutor General’s Office, which has been tight-lipped about the searches, offered vague clues as to government’s objectives on Thursday, saying in a statement that the operation would allow officials to establish “positive and negative tendencies” and analyze current NGO laws.

Inspectors have reportedly searched for signs of illegal “extremism” and financing with particular zeal, and the prosecutors’ statement referred to ultranational and radical religious groups operating under different names. It did not mention foreign agents, whose outing is the goal of the searches, the Justice Ministry said Monday.

But if inspectors were after extremism, “Why are they often joined by tax, fire and other inspectors?” said Mikhail Fedotov, head of the presidential human rights council.

One group received a citation because it did not have a plan for fighting rats, “a serious oversight, of course, but it has nothing to do with extremism, unless you’re suggesting that the rats are being used to deliver biological weapons,” Fedotov said.

Prosecutors have not yet responded to a written request for additional clarification from the human rights council as required to do so by presidential writ, Chikov said, adding that the council hoped to receive a reply by late April, when he said the checks were scheduled to wrap up.

This new law was passed in the wake of the large anti-Kremlin protests that occurred after President Putin’s inauguration. Putin blamed these protests on the interference of foreign governments.

Human rights groups like Memorial and For Human Rights are already dealing with acts of intimidation and vandalism due to this law. Both had “Foreign Agent” spray-painted on their buildings last Wednesday.

Many human rights groups have decided to defy the ‘Foreign Agent’ law, despite the many repercussions that they could face, including fines, a forced shutdown and/or a prison sentence of up to two years. Memorial’s chairman, Oleg P. Orlov, explains, “A foreign agent equals a traitor, a betrayer of the homeland. [Groups that comply] will be outcasts of society. They will be branded. The public will look at them with suspicion, and officials will simply refuse to associate with them. They will be outcasts.” Other groups have opted to simply stop receiving any form of outside funding.

It is not yet apparent how the ‘Foreign Agent’ law will be enforced, as the wording is vague and is supposed to only include groups involved in “political activities.” The Justice Ministry will be overseeing it.

Based on reporting by The New York Times.

Sharansky and Wiesel both noted that “students and housewives” were the driving force behind the December 1987 demonstration, not the established Jewish organizations. Indeed, American Jewish leaders were initially skeptical that the December 1987 rally (scheduled to coincide with a meeting in D.C. between President Reagan and Soviet Premier Gorbachev) would attract more than 17,000 people.Thanks to the grassroots Jewish community that included organizations like UCSJ, there was a much larger turnout of over 250,000 people.

This demonstration encouraged the American Jewish establishment to take action.

Sharansky described feeling “vindicated” and “inspired” by the large crowd that came out in support. Wiesel added that there was a shared feeling “that you are not alone, that there was a sense of history about you, always remembering Jewish history,” adding “with it you can never fail.”

Based on reporting by The Jewish Week.

The Freedom 25 coalition is currently planning a series of events to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the December 1987 march. Their goal is “to assure that the critical lessons of the Soviet Jewry movement are learned by future generations, so they can again be applied to expand the reach of freedom.”

Visit their website for more information on these events, including a virtual march on December 6, 2012 that you can sign up for online.

Moscow–

The criminal case against Sergey Udaltsov and other “heroes” of NTV propagandistic films shows that the current regime in Russia has crossed the red line from being a simply repressive violator of democratic principles to a totalitarian one. The absurdity of accusations, reminiscent of Stalin-era actions, demonstrates the Russian authorities’ serious intention to bring down all of its force on the peaceful opposition.

We state, understanding the responsibility, that even if all the words said by the participants of the meeting shown in the film “Anatomy of the Protest-2” are true, there is absolutely no legal grounds for the prosecution of the accused people.

We believe that those who join campaigns to slander the opposition, and who willingly help authorities persecute innocent people, are shameful.

Despite the fact that it is the high authorities’ decision to legally persecute the opposition, we declare that it is Investigation Committee’s leaders, headed by Alexander Ivanovich Bystrikin, who carry full personal responsibility for the fabrication of criminal cases.

Unfortunately, today, A.I. Bystrikin has begun to play the same role in domestic justice as the horribly remembered Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (General Prosecutor during Stalin’s Moscow Trials of 1936- 1938 and later involved in Stalin’s political trials).

The fabrication of cases against the opposition is creating an irreversible situation that is dangerously raising the degree of confrontation in Russian society.

We demand:

- immediate release of all political prisoners,

- cessation of the persecution of the opposition under fabricated accusations and

- dismissal of A.I. Bystrikin from his position

We call on parliamentary and non-parliamentary opposition, as well as all civil society, to come forward against the persecution of the protest movement activists.

Lev Ponomarev, Executive Director of All Russian Movement “For Human Rights”

Igor Bakirov, coordinator of the Movement “White Ribbon”

Ludmilla Alekseeva, Chair of Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG)

Sergey Kovalev, Chair of Museum Council and Andrey Sakharov Public Center

This information is provided by the organization “For Human Rights”

Tell: 602-22-24; 691-6233

E-mail: news@zaprava.ru; zpch@mail.ru

By Daniil Meshcheryakov, Executive Director of the Moscow Helsinki Group

Politically active groups continued to advocate for a nationalist agenda within the broader protest movement. In recent discussions organized by the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation called “The Nationalist threat in Russia: Trends, Prospects and Countermeasures” the results of 2011 were discussed, including the rise of xenophobia and a decrease in the number of hate crimes due to better law enforcement.

January marked the beginning of the electoral campaign in Russia, and the most important political event was the publication of an article by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called “Russia: the National Question” in the state newspaper. The caused a strong reaction from the public. The fact that the Prime Minister published an article on this subject shows its importance. Some of the articles provisions may be included in his presidential platform. However, experts doubt their feasibility. There are human rights concerns as well. It includes a proposal to tighten the registration standards for migrants in order to counter the flow of “illegal migrants” and social conflict. Also, despite the recognition of the importance of education in developing adequate attitudes to cultural, ethnic and religious diversity, Putin chose to focus on efforts such as introducing compulsory examination of migrants in the Russian language, Russian history, and Russian culture.

The wave of social activism caused by the falsification of election results in December 2011 has resulted in a number of internal discussions within the civic movement on whether or not to cooperate with the nationalists. They have decided not to. The anti-fascist activists were united in honoring the memory of murdered human rights journalists Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova in 22 Russian cities. This caused a violent reaction from the neo-Nazis who attacked participants in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Voronezh.

On January 21, a rally of several hundred Moscow football fans was organized to demand the investigation of the attack on the fan of the Spartak football team member Alexey Ershov, who was wounded by Andronick Simonyan, an ethnic Armenian, in September, 2010. The protesters made sure that the case had been sent to court, echoing a similar incident last year. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Putin met with football fans regarding the upcoming World Cup to be held in Russia in 2018 and promised to pay proper attention to the “national question” in Russia.

According to the Sova Center, in January 2012, at least 11 people suffered from racist or neo-Nazi attacks. One native of Azerbaijan was killed and 10 people were assaulted. The federal list of extremist materials, was updated in January four times and seven new items were added to it, including several related to Islamic fundamentalism and a brochure titled “Expansion from the South. Stop it?!”.