Russia’s Ministry of Justice Friday canceled the registration of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and 13 other international organisations citing “the discovery of violations of the current legislation of the Russian Federation.”
The Ministry announced its decision to de-register the Moscow offices of organisations including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation from the register of the representative offices of the international organizations and foreign NGOs. The statement by the Ministry does not provide any specifications regarding the alleged violations of Russian laws.
The de-registration follows the UN General Assembly’s resolution to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council over human rights abuses in Ukraine. Executive director of HRW Kenneth Roth said, “Human Rights Watch has been working on and in Russia since the Soviet era, and we will continue to do so . . . [T]his new iron curtain will not stop our ongoing efforts to defend the rights of all Russians and to protect civilians in Ukraine.”
Secretary-General of Amnesty International Agnès Callamard emphasised the organisation’s commitment to speaking truth to power:
In a country where scores of activists and dissidents have been imprisoned, killed or exiled, where independent media has been smeared, blocked or forced to self-censor, and where civil society organizations have been outlawed or liquidated, you must be doing something right if the Kremlin tries to shut you up . . . [W]e will redouble our efforts to expose Russia’s egregious human rights violations both at home and abroad.
Russia has been targeting civil society even prior to its attack on Ukraine. The country’s supreme court recently turned down an appeal by Memorial International, an organisation that highlights the plights of victims of the Soviet regime, against a ruling forcing it to liquidate under Russia’s controversial “foreign agent” law. Last year, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) had intervened in the matter, instructing Russia not to implement the impugned decision, but the high court later ruled that the ECtHR’s injunction was invalid.
On March 4, President Putin also signed amendments to the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation to stifle civil society, activists, lawyers and journalists and clamp down on criticism of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The law has been dubbed a “total information blackout” by UN experts. The federal law introduced criminal liability for the public dissemination of deliberately misleading information and discrediting the use of the Russian Federation Armed Forces.
