Justice Ministry refuses to remove former ‘foreign agents’ from NGO blacklist

Non-profit organizations that have succeeded in having their “foreign agent” status officially removed will still remain on the Justice Ministry's list of foreign agents, according to the newspaper Vedomosti.

Initially, the law on foreign agents did not account for any possibility of removal from the state's official registry of foreign agents. Three years after it passed, the Justice Ministry has yet to add these amendments to its bylaws.

Organizations no longer classified as foreign agents remain on the foreign-agent blacklist, though Justice Ministry officials do add the date that the organization's status changed, as well as the reason for the change.

A civil rights group, which had its past foreign-agent status removed officially, has appealed to the Supreme Court against the Justice Ministry's blacklisting procedures.

Another former classified foreign agent, the Grani Center, a non-profit civil-society organization promoting business, has written to the Justice Ministry about the removal of its entry from the blacklist. “Public officials and the general population are apprehensive of such organizations,” said the center's director, Svetlana Makovetska, commenting on being stuck on the blacklist.

The Justice Ministry counters that the process for removing groups from the blacklist is fully regulated by the law on non-profit organizations. Any further attempts to change its blacklisting rules would be an impractical duplication of its efforts, the agency says.

These non-profit organizations demand that the Supreme Court recognize that the Justice Ministry is operating counter to the law, says attorney Andrew Lepekhin. “The law states that non-profit organizations can be removed from the blacklist, and the [executive] order regulating its enforcement doesn't provide for exceptions. (That is to say, if there is no mechanism to enforce a law properly, the law is not enforced.”

The law on non-profit foreign agents has been in operation since 2012. It obliges those non-profit organizations engaged in political activity, which are financed from abroad, to be registered as foreign agents. Foreign-agent status may also be assigned on the basis of a state audit. Groups refusing to register as a foreign agent face various fines.

In spring 2015, the foreign-agents law was amended so that groups on the list could be removed, if they didn't receive funds from abroad and/or had not taken part in political activities for more than a year.

As of January 28, 21 companies have been declassified as foreign agents, but they still remain registered on the foreign-agents blacklist.