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#3 - JRL 2006-242 - JRL Home
Many human rights projects frozen as NGOs fail to get re-registered in Russia
Interfax

Moscow, 1 November: The fact that the operation of a number of foreign non-governmental organizations [NGO] in Russia has been suspended due to problems with re-registration has lead to many human rights and humanitarian projects being frozen, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, head of Moscow Helsinki Group, told Interfax today.

"About 100 out of 500 organizations have been re-registered. The problem is that the rest of the organizations suspended their operation. But they worked a lot and worked on their own money," Alekseyeva said.

Human rights activists report that dozens of subsidiaries of foreign NGOs refused to go through re-registration, because they found the procedure too complex, Alekseyeva added. [Passage omitted]

The Human Rights Watch office in Moscow and the Amnesty International resource centre in Russia have not been re-registered as yet. [Passage omitted]

At the same time, branches of the international organization Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, the MSF) were re-registered. Dutch, Belgian and French branch offices of the MSF operate in Russia. "All our offices have been re-registered," the MSF mission's spokeswoman, Emma Bell, told Interfax.

The Moscow office of the Danish Refugee Council, a large humanitarian organization working in the North Caucasus, has also been also re-registered and now operates in normal mode.

The Federal Registration Service told Interfax that as of 27 October, 131 branch offices of foreign NGOs were re-registered. Documents of 57 NGOs were checked and processed, documents of 22 NGOs were returned for re-working. [Passage omitted to end].