Tag: Russian NGOs

Diabetics in Saratov Deemed Threat to Russian National Security

insulincPatriotic Russian diabetics treat their disease only with domestically produced insulin, such as Rosinsulin, pictured here. Photo courtesy of Medsintez Pharmaceutical Plant

For Insufficient Enthusiasm
Court Rules Saratov Regional Organization of Chronic Diabetes Sufferers “Foreign Agents.” Activists “Undermined the State’s Authority” by Questioning  Insulin Produced in Russia
Nadezhda Andreyeva
Novaya Gazeta
March 28, 2018

Saratov’s Frunza District Court today concluded its hearing of administrative charges against the Saratov Regional Organization of Chronic Diabetes Sufferers. Judge Maria Agisheva ruled the diabetics had violated the law on “foreign agents.”

The defense had asked for a postponement of the hearing, since Moscow human rights lawyer Nikolai Dronov, who had been representing the diabetics in court the past five months, was unable to travel to Saratov today. In addition, the organization’s president, Larisa Saygina, had not been able to read the findings of a forensic examination of the case, submitted to the court on Friday, May 25. Judge Agisheva rejected the defense’s motion, but announced a half-hour recess so the diabetics could read the findings of court-appointed experts.

The forensis examination was carried out by faculty members at the Saratov State Legal Academy (SGYuA). The court had attempted to engage specialists from RANEPA and the Kazan Interregional Expertise Center, but they had turned down the court’s request on various pretexts. SGYuA had also rendered its expert opinion last year, when the administrative case was in the process of being filed. As we reported earlier, Professor Ivan Konovalov saw signs of the work of “foreign agents” in the activities of the diabetics organization. The forensic examination was performed by his SGYuA colleagues Associate Professor Elena Koloyartseva and Professor Viktor Kupin.

According to SGYuA’s experts, the Saratov Regional Organization of Chronic Diabetes Sufferers was awarded a grant of 712,000 rubles [approx. €9,800] from foreign pharmaceutical companies. The authors of the forensic examination thus concluded the organization had engaged in political activity, namely, it had submitted critical remarks about the work of officials to the authorities. According to the political scientists, the organization’s former head, Yekaterina Rogatkina, had publicly expressed doubts about the quality of insulin produced in Russia, thus undermining the Russian state’s authority. [The emphasis here and elsewhere is in the original article—TRR.]

The experts found it noteworthy the media reported on the filing of administrative charges against the diabetics organization. In particular, the commentary of the organization’s current president, Larisa Saygin, filmed for the Saratov TV program “Open Channel” on a city street, was regarded by the experts as a solo picket. According to SGYuA’s faculty members, the news report had been deliberately aired three months before the presidential election in order to discredit presidential candidate Vladimir Putin.

We should recall at this point it was Nikita Smirnov, the head of Putin’s student campaign headquarters in Saratov, who had filed the complaint against the diabetics with the the local prosecutor’s office.

As the experts emphasized in their findings, opposition leader Mikhail Khodorkovsky offered the Saratov diabetics legal assistance, which likewise testified to the organization’s guilt.

As indicated on SGYuA’s website, Professor Koloyartseva studied in the 1980s at the Saratov State Pedagogical Institute. In 2001, she was awarded a kandidat degree in political science. She serves on the public council of the Saratov Regional Duma. She is also a member of Civic Dignity, a grassroots organization that supports social and civic activism among young people and has been heavily involved in forums on moral and spiritual growth sponsored by the authorities.

According to the website Legal Russia, Viktor Kupin graduated from the Lenin Military Political Academy in 1978, while Saratov media outlets earlier reported he studied at the Engels Air Defense Academy.

Until 2007, Professor Kupin taught a course entitled “Philosophical and Political Problems of National Security” at military academies in Petersburg.

In 2004, Professor Kupin defended his doktor dissertation, entitled “The Geopolitical Imperatives of Global Security.”

In 2014, Kupin was an expert in the trial of Partnership for Development, an environmental organization that had operated in Saratov Region since 1995. The NGO received $42,000 from the US government to encourage civic involvement in the region’s villages and small towns. An anonymous complaint against Partnership for Development was filed with the prosecutor’s office on July 10, 2014. On July 22, an administrative case was opened against the organization under Article 19.34 of the Administrative Offenses Code (“Absence of registration in the relevant registry on the part of an organization performing the work of a foreign agent”).

Professor Kupin’s expert finding was ready the very same day. As he explained in court, he wrote the five pages of text in several hours, since he had been asked to do it “as soon as possible.” According to Professor Kupin, Partnership for Development showed clear signs of carrying out the “political orders of a foreign state, orders meant to undermine social stability, generate political tension in the region, expand the base of political influence on public opinion [sic], and  implement US geopolitical interests.”

“The interest in Saratov Region was occasioned by its special place and exceptional geopolitical position in Russia as a lynch pin in the emergent Eurasian Union of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan,” wrote  Professor Kupin. “[Partnership for Development’s] activity runs counter to the security interests of Russia, which opposes the uni-polar dictatorship of the world, headed by the US.”

Less than a month after the prosecutor received the anonymous complaint, a court ruled Partnership for Development was a “foreign agent.” It was fined 300,000 rubles. Its chair, Olga Pitsunova, was also personally fined 100,000 rubles. Partnership for Development closed up shop.

At today’s hearing, Judge Agisheva denied the defense’s motion to summon its own expert witnesses to the trial. The diabetics were fined 300,000 rubles [approx. 4,100 euros]. The organization’s ex-president, Ms. Rogatkina, told us the diabetics would appeal the ruling.

“We are discouraged. This case was absurd from the outset.  We consider it a miscarriage a justice.”

Putinist youth activist Nikita Smirnov. Photo courtesy of Novaya Gazeta

Last year, Mr. Smirnov, a student at the Saratov Medical University and head of Vladimir Putin’s student campaign headquarters, asked the Frunza District Prosecutor’s Office to verify whether the work of the diabetic organizations was covered by the law on “foreign agents.”

As the future physician told us, he had “read on the internet that the organization was financed by foreign companies, I don’t remember which.” He had felt it was his “civic duty” to “send a signal.”

Translated by the Russian Reader

Petersburg Enviromental Rights Center Bellona Declared “Foreign Agent”

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Petersburg Environmental Center Bellona Declared Foreign Agent 
Interfax
January 16, 2017

On Monday, the Russian Federal Justice Ministry placed the Petersburg enviromental organization Bellona on its list of “foreign agents,” according to the ministry’s website.

“The fact that the organization bears the hallmarks of a non-profit organization, performing the functions of a foreign agent, was established during an unscheduled site inspection carried out by the Justice Ministry’s St. Petersburg office,” read the message on the website.

In March 2015, the Justice Ministry placed the non-profit public environmental organization Bellona Murmansk on the list of “foreign agents.” Six months later, the organization closed.

The non-profit public organization Bellona was formed in 1986. Its central office is in Oslo. Two branches of the environmental organization operated in Russia, in Murmansk and St. Petersburg.

Translation and photo by the Russian Reader; the emphasis is mine

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Environmental Rights Center Bellona called a ‘foreign agent’ by Russian government
Charles Digges
Bellona
January 16, 2017

In a troubling development for international ecological groups that deal with questions of Russia’s Cold War nuclear legacy, Moscow’s Justice Ministry on Monday named the Environmental Rights Center Bellona as a “foreign agent.”

ERC Bellona, founded by Alexander Nikitin in 1998, became the 158th organization tarred with the foreign agent label since the restrictive 2012 Law on NGOs came into effect.

Nikitin said the group had been undergoing a so-called unplanned check since before the New Year, and had been told it would receive written notification about its status from the Justice Ministry by December 25.

But that date came and went with no notice. Nikitin first learned of the new designation Monday, when Russia’s state newswire TASS began reporting on the organization’s designation as a foreign agent.

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ERC Bellona Chairman Alexander Nikitin (Photo: Bellona)

Nikitin was undeterred by the news.

“We expected this decision,” said Nikitin. But he also said it would not impede the organization’s mission.

“This means that we will continue working,” Nikitin said.

“We won’t throw aside our very important work over such small change,” he said. “All of our projects remain, all of our people will remain, and we will find ways to continue our work.”

The group has long had a turbulent relationship with officialdom. When it was founded, Nikitin was on trial for supposedly revealing state secrets in a Bellona report on the decrepit state of Russia’s northern nuclear fleet.

In 2000, Nikitin was fully acquitted by the Russian Supreme Court and became the only individual to ever be cleared of treason charges leveled by Russian or Soviet security services.

The report he and Bellona wrote then became a guidepost document for western governments that wanted to invest in helping Russia secure its Cold War legacy of decommissioned nuclear submarines and military nuclear waste, programs that continue successfully to this day.

ERC Bellona has helped target more than $3 billion worth of international funding to dismantle 200 derelict submarines and other floating nuclear hazards in the Arctic region, like the Lepse nuclear service ship.

The group has also been instrumental in decades-long joint efforts between Norway and Russia to clean up the notorious submarine maintenance base at Andreyeva Bay.

Bellona’s efforts were jeopardized in 2012 when the Russian government passed its NGO law stipulating that non-profits operating in whole or in part on foreign funding must register themselves as “foreign agents” with the Justice Ministry if they engage in broadly defined “political activity.”

The Ministry in 2014 was given broad powers to name foreign agents on its own.

The law has shuttered more than a third of NGOs in the country, one of which was Bellona’s oldest Russian office, Bellona Murmansk.

That group decided to disband itself rather than undertake considerable legal costs to have its name removed from the foreign agent registry.

The decision by the Justice Ministry to list ERC Bellona as a foreign agent dashes considerable recent hopes that the government might cease targeting environmental groups with the foreign agent label.

The Justice Ministry’s report said ERC Bellona was engaged in political activity for “publishing, including via contemporary informational technologies, opinions on decisions taken by the government and policies that it has adopted,” apparently a reference to Bellona’s Russian website, Bellona.ru.

The Justice Ministry also accused ERC Bellona of attempting to “form socio-political opinions and convictions.”

Nikitin has long said ERC Bellona has nothing to do with any kind of political activity. But amendments to the NGO law last year impossibly broadened the notion of political activity.

Those amendments, which were signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in June, “maximally restricted” what NGOs could do, said Nikitin.

Among the more exotic interpretations of what political activity is are the popular practice of sending open letters to Russian politicians at any level of government; participating in gatherings or demonstrations; criticizing laws passed by any level of government; using websites to air opinions about any decision made by the government, and any attempts to influence the drafting of legislation.

The police department in St. Petersburg had recently launched a campaign of demanding financial information from the city’s 158 nonprofits that accept some amount of funding from foreign sources.