The list of NGOs visited by prosecutors and other inspectors during last days, is impressive: Transparency International, Amnesty International, Memorial, Moscow Helsinki Group, Human Rights Watch, Agora, For Human Rights (Za prava cheloveka), GOLOS, and numerous regional NGOs.

Even regional organisation Shield and Sword of Chuvashiya, which actually appealed to the Ministry of Justice seeking “foreign agents” status, has received a notification of an inspection.

According to the law, an NGO that receives financing from abroad, has to register as “foreign agent” or face criminal charges. “Foreign agents” are obliged to mark the literature and online content they produce as “distributed by foreign agent”. The law stipulates that they have to report to inspection bodies far more often than organisations that do not receive financing from abroad. The frequency of “foreign agents” inspections is not limited by the law. Russian authorities have gained a legal tool for paralysing NGOs they don’t like simply by swamping them with inspections.

Several human rights NGOs unanimously concluded the law doesn’t comply with justice and the constitution and made a decision to boycott it by not registering as foreign agents.

Many of them came through planned inspections by the Ministry of Justice this winter – not as “foreign agents”, just as NGOs – to face extraordinary prosecutors’, tax, sanitary and other authorities’ inspections in March.

Russian veteran rights activist, head of “For Human Rights” organization Lev Ponomarev refused to provide prosecutors with the organisation’s documentation. He says, according to the law about, prosecutors had to provide him with information about violations of law by his organisation – such information being supposedly the only purpose for their sudden extraordinary inspections.

Prosecutors still haven’t provided NGOs with this information.

But the General prosecutor’s office representative Marina Gridneva has said the prosecutors “act in compliance with the law”.

President Vladimir Putin, replying to Russian ombudsman Vladimir Lukin concerns over the inspections, said these “are routine measures linked to the desire of the law enforcement agencies to bring the activities of organisations in line with the law.”

Political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin told Index on Censorship that the authorities aim to emphatically close one of Russian human rights NGO “or make it hysterical” in order to chill others.

“The authorities think the problem will be solved, when someone shuts down in fear” said Oreshkin. “Lev Ponomarev has survived the Soviet era fighting for human rights, he knows the law better than law enforcement bodies, and he is not likely to be the one to fulfill the authorities’ expectations by fearing them.”

The authorities, according to Oreshkin, are demonstrating incompetence and incapability.

“The NGO boycott obviously enraged the Kremlin. Human rights activists, more than anyone else, now how crucially solidarity is.”

The state’s inconsistence, demonstrated during the ongoing NGOs inspections is based on a wrong perception of the word “law”, Oreshkin claims:

“The law concerns a citizen and an authority; the authorities have passed laws against citizens hoping they won’t have to keep within the law themselves”.

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Russian police raided private apartments and office premises of human rights activists in the city of Voronezh — 500 kilometres south of Moscow — on Wednesday, Index learnt from direct accounts of the episode.

Early in the morning, anti-extremism police forces (known as “Centre E”) and investigators from Moscow entered and searched the private homes of six local activists, who were later taken to police facilities and interrogated. Computer equipment, leaflets and books were confiscated from their flats.

Later, also on Wednesday, eight plain-clothed police officers broke into the Human Rights House-Voronezh, headquarters of several local human rights NGOs. Their visit resembled a “gang raid” — said one witness to Index — rather than a legitimate search by a law enforcement agency. The officers refused to identify themselves or present a legal search warrant. They forced Victoria Gromova, director of the Youth Human Rights Movement, out of her office, blocked several activists in one of rooms, and locked themselves inside another, where they rummaged through documents and files. The raiders did not allow in an attorney the activists called during the incident. They left together with two computers, hard disks and USB drives they confiscated.

The official line on the busts was the investigation following the criminal case against three Russian opposition leaders, Sergei Udaltsov, Leonid Razvozzhaev and Konstantin Lebedev. They stand accused of plotting mass riots in Moscow in May 2012, in the context of the protests against the rigged elections that saw Vladimir Putin elected the president of Russia for the third time.

Andrey Yurov, a human rights defender and a member of the Presidential Council on the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, told Index:

It looks like certain groups within the authorities try to ‘mix’ human rights defenders with political opposition. They want to show we are the same; that we are involved in political activities and struggle for power, while in reality we fight for rights and try to preserve political neutrality. Those groups in power just don’t want any neutral mediators to exist in the society, so it is ‘black and white’ and it is easier ‘to fight enemies of the state’.

Yury Dzibladze, the president of the Centre for the Development of Democracy and Human Rights, is convinced the latest events mark a new level of the Russian authorities’ war against civil society of the country:

The government certainly sees more and more people in Russia become politically involved; they go out in the streets to protest, they share their views online, they got involved with civic activism in different forms. This broadening activism and protest movement scared the authorities, who are willing to preserve power. This is exactly the reason why several repressive laws were adopted in Russia within last months that changed the very fundamental principles of functioning of the state and its relations with civil society.

The new legal framework that has an impacting on civil society includes regional laws that ban “propaganda of homosexuality”, for example, and restores criminal liability for libel.

However, the most notorious amendments include new rules on assembly, demonstrations and non-governmental organisations activities; those who receive foreign funds for their activities are expected to register as “foreign agents”.

Exactly at the same time when human rights defenders in Voronezh were searched by the police, the State Duma — the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament — adopted in the second reading a new repressive law, already dubbed the “anti-Magnitsky act”. It further deteriorates the legal framework for civil society organisations, as it provides, for instance, for suspending of activities of NGOs “involved in political activities” or “threatening Russian Federation’s interests.” Despite these terms not being legally defined and being clearly political, the State Duma is expected to adopt the draft law in the third, final, reading this Friday.

The laws are not only being adopted, they are implemented against activists that feel direct repressions,” Yury Dzhibladze says. “This is not a ‘cold war’ anymore; this war the authorities of Russia declared to civil society is becoming more and more real.”

Andrei Aliaksandrau is the Belarus and OSCE Programme Officer at Index; he tweets @aliaksandrau

The picture shows the mess left after the police raided Human Rights House-Voronezh. Photo Victoria Gromova’s Facebook page

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The post INDEX INTERVIEW: “Punk prayer is not a crime,” says released Pussy Riot member appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Kirsty Hughes, Chief Executive of Index on Censorship, said:

“In Putin’s Russia, free expression has become a crime. The women of Pussy Riot should be released immediately  — and should never have been  put through this absurd case.  Artistic expression is not a crime — it’s a right, and an integral part of all free societies.  The PussyRiot verdict is the latest indication that Vladimir Putin’s Russia does not respect human rights and is sliding backwards to dictatorship”.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Ekaterina Samutsevic were arrested in March, after performing a 40-second “punk prayer” against Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Church. The case has been condemned by activists as being politically motivated, and has drawn criticism from well-known musicians from across the globe.

READ MORE ABOUT PUSSY RIOT

For media enquiries on this story, please contact Padraig Reidy: padraig@indexoncensorship.org /  @mePadraigReidy

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Russian parliamentarians have passed legislation that will establish a central register of banned websites. The new laws are ostensibly designed for child protection, but Andrei Soldatov says the real aim is to take control over the country’s burgeoning social networks

READ: INDEX CONDEMNS RUSSIAN INTERNET BLACKLIST PLAN

This article was originally published at OpenDemocracy

On 11 June the Russian State Duma passed amendments to the laws ‘On the protection of children from information deemed harmful to their health and development’, ‘On information’, ‘On communications’ and the Code of Administrative Offences at the second and third readings. The main gist of the draft law is that from 1 November this year Russia will have a single register of sites and web pages to be blocked (“Single Register of domain names, internet page selectors and URLs identifying sites in the internet containing information banned in the Russian Federation”).

For the first time the Kremlin will have at its disposal the facilities for blocking access to internet resources across the whole of Russia.

The principle of internet censorship is, of course, not a new one to the Russian authorities. For some five years now, regional and city prosecutors have been busy implementing regional court decisions that required providers to block access to forbidden sites. Up until now this has been done unsystematically, so that sites blocked in one region remained accessible in others. The Register, which is to be compiled by a special federal organisation, will remove this problem.

It seems that the new system will be modelled on the one that is currently used to block extremist bank accounts. In this process, the Office of the Prosecutor General, the Ministry of Justice, the Investigative Committee and the Ministry of the Interior submit data to a central agency (in this case: Rosfinmonitoring, the federal financial monitoring service). The agency compiles and updates a central database of “organisations and physical entities known to be involved in extremist activities or terrorism”. The List is sent to all organisations operating in the areas of finance and property and is available for download via a password-encrypted area of the Rosfinmonitoring site. People in charge of internal monitoring in banks are in their turn obliged to check that a given client is not on the black list. If he is, the bank has 24 hours to submit data about him and his company to Rosfinmonitoring, who are then able to close down his operations.

The same principle will apply for the Register of banned websites: as soon as a website appears in the Register, the service provider will have 24 hours to block access to it.

After the Arab Spring, the Kremlin gave serious thought to developing facilities for averting “enemy activity” on the Russian internet. The problem has been under discussion since the summer of 2011 at various levels: the heads of state of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation members, prosecutors general and the security services. The growth of political activism in Russia and the role of social networking in mobilising protestors has only increased the paranoia. It seemed, however, that the security services were unable to devise an effective strategy to deal with the problem.

In March, Irina Borogan and I wrote that immediately after the Arab Spring the security services started developing a strategy for the blogosphere and social networking sites, but had not managed to come up with anything before the December [anti-government] protests. They were used to dealing with threats of a more traditional nature and were confused when faced with a protest organisation with no centre, but instead worked through the social networking sites. Our sources in the secret services said then that they were powerless to deal with these sites, especially any that were based on servers outside of the country such as Facebook and Twitter (“what can we do if [the pro-Chechen] Kavkazcenter opens a page on Facebook?” was their rhetorical question).

Source: Yandex/Fom

On 27 March of this year, this failure was indirectly recognised by the First Deputy Director of the FSB, Sergei Smirnov. At a meeting of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure within the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Smirnov referred to the relevance the Arab Spring has in terms of current thinking. He said: “New technologies used by Western special services to create and maintain a level of continual tension in society with serious intentions extending even to regime change (…) Our elections, especially the presidential election and the situation in the preceding period, revealed the potential of the blogosphere.” Smirnov stated that it was essential to develop ways of reacting adequately to the use of such technologies and confessed openly that “this has not yet happened”.

The Register of banned websites is clearly one of the measures devised in the subsequent months.

Once it has been set up, this nationwide system for filtering Internet traffic will always be available, ready for use against anyone deemed dangerous by the authorities.

The Register is ostensibly for the protection of children, but from the very beginning it was clear that this was no more than a pretext. Apart from references to child pornography and paedophilia, the draft law contains a paragraph to the effect that those compiling the Register will also draw on court decisions involving the banning of websites. These decisions currently refer mainly to radical sites or opposition sites accused of extremism. This paragraph is an obvious attempt to impose a system on the hitherto un-coordinated efforts of provincial prosecutors to block banned sites in their own regions. There will now be a special state organisation responsible for ensuring that within 24 hours sites become inaccessible throughout all of Russia.

Filtering on a nationwide basis will be supported organisationally by ministries; there will also be technological backup.

The text of the draft law states that the Register will list not only domain names and URLs, but individual page selectors too. To block sites, providers will have to buy expensive DPI (deep packet inspection) equipment, which enables the provider to split the traffic into separate streams, dividing up audio, video, images and spam. With this equipment a provider will be able to block requests for, and from, specific addresses; the provider will also be able to turn off individual services — for example, to completely block internet-telephony such as Skype, which has so far been difficult to monitor.

DPI will address the problem of Facebook, which is a source of such irritation for officers of the Russian security services. Special services in Uzbekistan, for example, compel local providers to use DPI to change the URLs of discussion groups in social networks.

Once it has been set up, this nationwide system for filtering Internet traffic will always be available, ready for use against anyone deemed dangerous by the authorities. Until recently, Russian security officials were always impeded by their technological backwardness.

Up till now the best the St Petersburg division of the FSB could do was to send a fax to Pavel Durov, founder of the social network Vkontakte (“in contact”), requiring him to close down protest groups. This was 20th century technology, but the Register, with its essential DPI component, will put Russian security officials at the vanguard of countries with web censorship. The world’s leading manufacturers of telecommunications equipment are more than happy to provide DPI equipment (including China’s Huawei, the US company CISCO, Canada’s Sandvine or Israel’s Narus, now owned by Boeing), and it is already in operation in Pakistan, China, Iran and the Middle East. According to Infonetics Research data, the world market for DPI products is already worth 470 million USD a year and the projected growth by 2016 is 2 billion USD.

Our State Duma is making sure that the Russian share of this market will be extremely significant.

Andrei Soldatov is a Russian security services expert, and together with Irina Borogan, co-founder of the Agentura.Ru web site. Last year, Soldatov and Borogan co-authored The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (PublicAffairs). 

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The post Russia: Judge extends detention of anti-Putin punk group Pussy Riot appeared first on Index on Censorship.

A Moscow court has confirmed the legality of the pre-trial detention of alleged Pussy Riot members Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Ekaterina Semutsevich.

The women had appealed against the Tagansky court decision detaining them until 24 June — when they will face a criminal trial on charges of hooliganism for allegedly staging an anti-Putin performance in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in the run-up to recent presidential elections. But the court has turned down their appeal.

Two of the three accused Pussy Riot members are mothers of young children. The maximum sentence for their charges is seven years in prison.

Tolokonnikova, Alekhina and Samutsevich deny the allegations and are considered prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International and other leading human rights activists in Russia and abroad.

The women’s arrests triggered an emotional public discussion about the Orthodox church’s relationship with Russian authorities and society. Radical nationalist movement members have been preventing activists from protesting against Pussy Riot arrests. The Church, led by patriarch Kirill, who publically supports Vladimir Putin, performed a public prayer in April “against blasphemers”. Kirill’s support of the Pussy Riot prosecution has concerned many religious Russians, who have petitioned for the release of the women.

Pussy Riot members who have not yet been arrested are now in hiding and are difficult to reach. They gave this exclusive email interview to Index on Censorship.

– Did you expect these consequences — arrests, criminal proceedings, your supporters being beaten and insulted by radical nationalists — when you planned your cathedral performance? Would you repeat the performance if you knew how this would end?

– We didn’t expect the arrest. We are a women’s group which is forced to consume the ideas of patriarchal conservative society. We experience each process that happens in this society. Besides, we are a punk band, which can perform in any public place, especially one which is maintained through our taxes. That’s why we would definitely repeat our prayer. It was worth it: look at the awakened pluralism — political and religious!

– The state remains intolerant towards much artistic expression. What about broader Russian society?

– We are trying to educate society and will definitely take the importance of this process into account in our further actions. We expect people to at least look through Wikipedia after watching us on YouTube.

– What must you do now to avoid arrests?

– After Putin’s inauguration, just wearing a white ribbon on your clothes — a symbol of protest — has become a reason for arrest in Moscow. So we don’t wear them now.

– Will you continue performing? You said that anonymity helps you replace the band members in case they get arrested. Have many people offered to join you?

– Many people have expressed their wish to participate in our perfomances and we are planning them right now. We don’t consider the patriarch’s ignorant opinion and are not going to perform any protest songs against him personally.

– The Russian Orthodox church, according to notable human rights activists, has lost its right to establish moral standards after having severely condemned you, as did some intellectuals who preferred not to notice your persecution. Who, in your perspective, is likely to take their place?

– We think that one can learn moral values through literature, music and art, but definitely not in church. And as far as people are concerned, any human being who advocates humanistic ideas should support any prisoner who has lost her freedom because the authorities are afraid to give up their power.

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Tens of thousands of people participated in opposition rallies against alleged unfair parliamentary elections in Russia. The biggest was in Moscow: up to 120 thousand people demanded Russia’s prime-minister Vladimir Putin resignation.

“Putin Thief”, “We need fair elections”, “Register opposition parties” — these were slogans of Russia’s biggest protest rally since the day of parliamentary elections and since the beginning of post-Soviet Russia.

Famous Russian writer Boris Akunin, known for his public support to former oligarch and Putin’s opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said he “hasn’t seen such Moscow for the last 20 years”. Opposition leaders, rights activists, well-known journalists and public figures appealed to the people to take further action to control authorities and use democratic tools to change government policy. The rally’s resolution included five points:

–        Political prisoners to be released immediately;

–        Elections results to be cancelled;

–        The head of the Central Election Commission Vladimir Churov to resign,and  his activities and election fraud to be investigated;

–        Opposition parties to be registered, democratic election law to be passed;

–        New fair elections to be held.

Rally participants agreed the authorities now have two weeks to react and fulfil their requirements. If not, a new rally, a bigger one, will be held on 24 December in Moscow and other cities. Opposition parties Yabloko and Communist Party, who took part in protest on 10 December, also resolved to remind the authorities about people’s demands on two rallies of their own — on 17 and 18 December respectively.

This day is not just remarkable because Moscow hasn’t faceda rally like this in 20 years, but also because other cities protested. Similar rallies were held in Saint Petersburg, Khabarovsk, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Samara amd other cities. Protests of solidarity were held outside Russia, too, in London, New-York, Oslo, Helsinki, Lisbon, Barcelona, Paris, Jerusalem, Tokio, Dublin, Berlin, Prague, Rome.

In most Russian cities policemen arrested tens of acivists, but in Moscow they earned applause from the rally participants for their unexpected accommodation. Previous Moscow protests against elections results have been marked with hundreds of detentions and cruel police actions.

Russian TV, just like the Moscow police, surprised people by broadcasting news about the rally. Previous protests were not covered. The current rally waseven  covered live, although neither Putin nor Medvedev were criticised on air and the rally’s topic — mass election fraud — was not explained or discussed during the broadcasts. Most items looked like reports on how well the police performed and how bad the traffic jams were because of the rally.

Inspite of rights activists’ words about “civil society rebirth” and “dramatic changes in Russia”, the Central Election Commission deputy Stanislav Vavilov said the Commission will not review election results. Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told journalist the government “has not yet formed an opinion on the rally”.

But post-Soviet Russia has changed already: Never before has it faced tens of thousands of people chanting that they, not Putin and his “United Russia”, are the real power.

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Police and anti-Putin protesters have clashed every day since the parliamentary elections on 4 December.

Hundreds of people protested against election fraud directly on elections day; most were detained by police. There were 8-10 thousand people (two thousand according to the police) in the centre of Moscow the day after elections.

Opposition leaders Ilya Yashin and Alexey Navalny were detained, as well as journalists from Reuters, Bloomberg, The New Times magazine, “Izvestia” newspaper and Lenta.ru news agency. The journalists were released, but Yashin and Navalny were sentenced to 15 days of arrest for “failure to follow a lawful order of policeman”. Both claim they didn’t break the law.

On 6 December, there was a rally at Triumphalnaya Square in Moscow with more than 1,000 protesters. People chanted “Putin thief”, “Russia without Putin”, “It’s a shame to be in NASHI”.

NASHI, a pro-government youth movementallied with two other pro-Kremlin organisations – “Stal” and “United Russia’s Young Guard” – celebrated the victory of United Russia in the parliamentary elections. Seventeen thousand members of these movements gathered at Moscow centre on 6 December. About two thousand of them went to Moscow’s Triumphalnaya Square to prevent anti-Putin protesters from holding a rally by standing there and shouting out “Putin, Medvedev, victory”.

Between 250 and 300 protesters were detained, including Yabloko party leader Sergey Mitrokhin; People’s Freedom Party leader Boris Nemtsov; Other Russia activist Eduard Limonov; Oleg Orlov , head of the Memorial human rights organisation; and journalists Bozhena Rynska of Gazeta.ru and Alexandr Chernykh of Kommersant.

Over 50,000 Ministry of Interior troops are located in Moscow together with policemen. Protesters and journalists have complained of their brutality and aggression from soldiers.

Similar protests were held in Saint-Petersburg  by about 800 protesters, 200 of whom were detained whilst Rostov-na-Donu, saw 300 protesters on the streets, 15 of whom were detained.

Russian TV reported on the actions of pro-government movements’ as if they were the only ones held. Pro-Putin demonstrators were described as “citizens tired of marginal groups they don’t support”, in coverage reminiscent of Breznev-era propaganda.

Activists were disappointed by a controversial statement made by Pavel Gusev, the leader of Journalists’ Union,  and public council of Moscow police, Olga Kostina. They accused journalists covering the anti-Putin demonstrations of “being biased and lacking objectivity” and “bringing difficulties to law enforcement authorities”.

In the meantime US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton expressed “serious concerns about the conduct of the election”. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High representative for foreign affairs and security policy expressed the same concerns commenting on a “lack of media impartiality, lack of separation between party and state, and the harassment of independent monitoring attempts” during parliamentary elections.

A big opposition rally against election fraud is expected on 10 December at Moscow Revolution Square just near the Kremlin. Moscow officials have authorised the rally, but troops remain in the city.

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