As the United Nations Human Rights Council concluded its 23rd session, FIDH deplores that the Council has failed to properly address the situation of the civil society in Russia, which faces increased repression and restrictions to their activities.
“It is now time for the Human Rights Council to act, if it is to be consistent with the resolution it adopted in March 2013 on NGOs’ access to funding and protection of human rights defenders”, said Olga Abramenko, Director of the Saint Petersburg-based Anti-Discrimination Centre Memorial (ADC Memorial), FIDH member organisation in Russia. “During its next session, to be held in September 2013, the Council should strongly condemn the harassment and criminalization of Russian NGOs that receive foreign funding, as well as the reprisals carried out against Russian civil society organizations”, she added.
ADC Memorial, one of the most active NGOs in combating discrimination, has recently been charged of having published a report and submitting it to the UN Committee against Torture. These charges have been leveled in the context of a law on non-profit organizations, adopted in 2012 which heavily affected the activities of hundreds of Russian NGOs. ADC Memorial, and other NGOs concerned, risk huge fines (up to several dozens of thousands of Euros) and compulsory registration as a “foreign agent”, as the new law requires.
The UN Committee against Torture specifically recommended to the Russian government to “ensure that no individual or group will be subjected to prosecution for communicating with, or for providing information to [it] (…) or to other United Nations human rights organs in performing their respective mandates”.
Conversely, since one year the Russian authorities have initiated a large-scale crackdown on civil liberties, passing a raft of new repressive measures in record time flagrantly contradicting the rights to free association, assembly and expression.
Just when the Human Rights Council was concluding its work, a new bill was adopted by the Russian Duma on June 11, 2013 in two final readings, almost unanimously: it bans ’propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations’, which is defined as "spreading information aimed at forming non-traditional sexual desires in children, describing such relations as attractive, promoting a distorted understanding of the social equality of traditional and non-traditional relations and through unwanted exposure to information that could provoke interest to such relations". If approved by the Upper chamber of the Parliament and signed by the President, the law, under the pretext of protecting the rights of minors, would ban de facto not only any demonstrations and gatherings by LGBT activists, but would also allow to silence them on-line, wiping out any expressions of tolerance towards homosexual, bisexual and transgender people, and by consequence all the possible work on protection of the social, political, economic or civil rights of these groups.
"The urgence of the situation should be heard by the Human Rights Council", said Karim Lahidji, FIDH President. "The Human Rights Council, the UN system’s only permanent and universal body in charge of human rights, should now give an adequate and strong response requesting Russia to respect its international commitments and obligations and its own Constitution.", he concluded.