After almost a year of court battle, the St.-Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Head Department of Ministry for Justice is now obliged to cancel its warning against the IIFD and to pay us 200 rubles to compensate the state duty. Is this a real compensation for a year of impossibility to work normally?

On July 21, 2010, the St.-Petersburg City Court reviewed a cassation appeal of the St.-Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Head Department of Ministry for Justice against the earlier low-instance court decision in favor of the IIFD, stated that:
1) government bodies are not always right;
2) their decisions are not always objective, and
3) NGOs can and must fight for their rights.

Status of NGOs in Russia is rather different from the third sector status in Europe. Inspecting authorities are always dominating, and many NGOs are afraid to argue on their own rights with state bodies. Therefore, an inspection by the Ministry for Justice is also a beginning of the end: even a minor infringement detected can lead to liquidation of a NGO.

In 2009, the territorial Head Department of the Ministry for Justice performed a scheduled inspection of the IIFD in order to conclude officially if the organization’s activities comply to Russian laws and to constituent documents.

On December 4, an inspection act listing detected infringements was made. The IIFD lawyers were baffled reading it: the organization was claimed infringing the law since it “does not assist her members in their activities. But nobody in the Department asked what activities did the IIFD members perform.

Ivan Pavlov, JD, PhD, IIFD Board Chair, comments: “We learnt about the scheduled inspection a month before it started thanks to the Department must publish inspection schedules at its official website. We collected a lot of documents, but within the inspection, the volume of papers required by the Department increased exponentially. For eleven months our NGO has been to spend resources and efforts excusing itself and proving that the Ministry for Justice’s claims are unjust. At last the battle ends: today, a court decision came into force, obliging the government body to cancel its warning fully, and to compensate our expenses amounting to 200 rubles of state duty.
But really this case has cost us thousands of rubles. Unfortunately, for almost a year, we were to protect ourselves instead of protecting citizens’ rights to information access”.

By the way, Pavlov defended the Regional Press Institute, another NGO from St.-Petersburg, in a similar case against the territorial body of the Ministry for Justice. This case is also won by the NGO.

Two cases for NGOs are becoming an important precedent for the Russian third sector since most warnings from the Ministry for Justice disbalanced NGO activities for a long time and quite often resulted in NGO liquidation. However, a court has confirmed: unlawful warnings can mnd should be contested. And 200 rubles will be paid to the IIFD some day.