At the end of last year, when the shameful law on public organizations was adopted, human-rights activists raised the alarm: The authorities were out to destroy them. The authorities, for their part, quickly made reassuring noises: The law could be corrected or amended if need be. Following the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, however, they chose their first victim - the Centre for International Defence Aid. The Centre has been in existence since the mid-1990s. It’s headed by prominent Russian lawyer Karinna Moskalenko, and mainly works on helping Russian citizens to frame their complaints to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, to which they often appeal. The Court in fact is bombarded with appeals from Russians. At a visiting session in Moscow in May held by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), Eric Jurgens, rapporteur for PACE’s Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee, told the chairman of the Russian Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin, that a quarter of all complaints from European countries were from Russia. Zorkin admitted that this was because Russian courts were failing to protect citizens’ rights and interests in law. There wasn’t anything else to be said. The authorities find all this unpleasant - especially in view of the fact that the European Court upholds the majority of them. According to Ms. Moskalenko, the authorities have also been long resentful of her personally, since she’s one of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s lawyers.

The attack on the Centre was played out via a familiar scenario: The Federal Tax Service filed an estimated 4.58-million-ruble tax claim for unpaid profit-tax on grants it received between 2002 and 2004. The grants came from the Ford Foundation (US), the Open society institute (Lichtenstein) and a number of other organizations. In receiving grants, NGOs have to obey two conditions: The spending of the grants must be geared to a particular purpose, and the grant-givers must be included in a list of organizations approved by the Russian government as exempt from taxation. The Federal Tax Service claims that the Centre broke at least one of these conditions: One of the grantors, the National Endowment for Democracy, wasn’t included on the government’s list.

Lawyers for the Centre, however, cite a 1992 agreement between Russia and the US, which specifies that any grants made by the National Endowment have to be exempt from taxes, since it’s a US government organization. Whatever happens, the Centre has said it’s ready strongly to resist the Federal Tax Service and to assert its rights before the European Court if necessary. Joining in this case, of course, the long queue of Russian appellants to the Strasbourg Court. . .

(Andrei Antonov, Novoye Vremya, 20.08.2006)