A Russian court has ordered the Memorial International organisation to close. This Russian organisation, which receives funding from abroad, has campaigned for a number of years to preserve the memory of the terrible deeds of repression that were committed during the Stalin era. More recently they seem to have become more of a general ‘Human Rights’ organisation promoting ‘democratic values’ – filing cases with the European Court of Human Rights and defending ‘political prisoners’.
In 2016 the organisation was added to the list of Foreign Agents. This is a Russian law which requires civil society organisations which receive funding from abroad to fulfil certain obligations. They have to file detailed accounts with the authorities and they have to display on each publication (including each web article) a message saying that they are a Foreign Agent. Memorial has been banned on the grounds that they have flouted this law by not displaying the statements as required by law. It seems they do not deny this. [1] The prosecutor argued in court that this was not an accident but was done specifically because they wanted to hide this.
I have had a look at their website – which is still available at the time of writing. There appears to be a fairly trimmed down list of funders which mentions a number of foundations, some Russian, and a few based abroad; for example – a German organisation which appears to be concerned with remembering the victims of Nazi atrocities. The Embassy of Canada in Russia is also mentioned. Not mentioned is the Soros Foundation (already banned in Russia) which has funded Memorial or US private Foundation the Ford Foundation. [2] Possibly the list is of current funders and these organisations no longer fund them – but it also seems possible that this list is rather carefully curated. (No US funders mentioned; there is quite a lot of anti American feeling in Russia and it would not make them more popular to admit to being funded by American foundations).
Continue reading “Correction – Russia is not “dismantling civil society””
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