Foreign Agents in Russia - Doria

деятельностью. НКО рекомендовано немедленно зарегистрироваться в Минюсте
в качестве иностранного агента, в противном случае ей грозит штраф 500
тысяч рублей или закрытие" (Ria Novosti 2013s.)
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"The ongoing work on a permanent basis of "Agora" is to assist political activists in
preventing their legal responsibility is to engage in political action and, consequently,
political activities. The NKO is recommended to immediately register into the Ministry
of Justice as a foreign agent, otherwise it faces a fine of 500,000 rubles or closure"
Both of the NKOs deny of being foreign agents and participation in political activities. Addingly
Agora emphasizes that it does not even cooperate with any political movements. Both of these two
attorney NKOs have been at times referred to as HROs and as I noted in chapter 4.1.1 the claimed
foreign agent features of human rights organizations is much debated in Russia. The cases of Agora
and the Public verdict describe how associating with political activists, analyzing the law in favor of
political activists and defending the activists by what the NKOs call human rights defense can
consequently be considered foreign agent activity. However the law states that an NKO has the
characteristics of a foreign agent if it acts politicaly and gets financed from abroad or non-Russian
directly or by secondhand but there are no clear stipulations according to which an NKO would
participate in political actions as a foreign agent via activities of its associates. Addingly in the case
of Public verdict the prosecutor noted that the legal work for citizen rights per se was not political
activity but the relations to political protestors and suggestions to improve the Ministry of Interior
are. However none of the published news reports mentioned any other relation between the political
protestors and the Public verdict or Agora. If advocating of general citizen rights is not political
action per se but the relations depicted only as advocative of clients' political rights is, then there is
discoursive connection between juridical advocacy of political activists and foreign agents.
4.2. Statements of Foreign Agents in General
Next to the actual accusations of non-commercial organizations violating the NKO law by not
registering themselves as foreign agents, there were many other events and statements in news
reports that have formulated the discourses of foreign agents. In many media stories the law
regulating non-commercial organizations was referred to as the law on foreign agents (закон о
иностранных агентах, zakon o inostrannyh agentah) which connects the ideas of NKOs and
foreign agents in a strong way. Such statements in their extreme mold the basic legal idea of a
foreign agent register where certain organizations register themselves towards ideas that NKOs and