Foreign Agents in Russia - Doria

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arguments, the law NKO made by the Russian legislation does not mention HROs and each human
rights group was taken into administrative inspections individually. The discoursive events in the
spring of 2013 where HROs were prosecuted for violating the NKO law on their side describe of
competitive discourses of the legal authority that does not target the HROs collectively but
individually from other features of the potential foreign agents.
4.1.2 Defining the Political Action of Foreign Agent NKOs
The political activities defining foreign agents can be considered widely interpretable and in media
it is sometimes even described as if political activities alone define foreign agents. In this paragraph
I highlight what was referred to as the defining political action of foreign agent consequently
dismissing the foreign financing aspect. For not making the false impression that the financing does
not matter I note how the Transparency International for example was only warned for its political
activities pointing out that if it would get foreign financing in the future it should register itself as a
foreign agent (Ria 2013u). I give the emphasis of this analysis subchapter onto the political
activities and give less attention to the non-Russian finance sources of foreign agents because the
foreign support factor was less debatable issue in media – very few NKOs denied the non-Russian
origin of their financing. Despite of the less controversy in the issue of defining the foreign
financing I notice the discoursive content on it as well in later subchapters.
It is notable that the first and due to the 11.11.2013 the only NKO registered as foreign
agent, the Promotion of Competition in the States of CIS (PCSC) (Ria 2013a) received very little
media coverage other than that it was the first one to register itself. There were no comments from
representatives of any party on the case before or after nor were there even any description of the
defining of their political activities or foreign financing. Discursively speaking the case of PCSC
does not show too much more than a precedent on how one NKO has registered itself as foreign
agent, there is barely anything more direct meaning given for it. If the process was followed from
news of Ria Novosti and Echo Moskvy it would thus suggest that the actual identification process
to be a foreign agent is rather easy. However the case of Promotion of Competition in the States of
CIS is exceptional as much more often NKOs were reported to fight against the law refusing to
register even with harsh economic consequences following from their disobedience. One other
exceptional case supporting the more difficult process of being foreign agent is in human rights
organization Shield and Sword (Щит и Меч) which tried to examine how the law works by
voluntarily registering as a foreign agent. (Echo 2013c.) In this case the Ministry of Justice
announced that it refuses to add the NKO to the register because it was not suitable for the
definition. The Ministry did not give further explanation for dismissing the application but the case