In late June, at a plenary session of the State Duma, there was a discussion of amendments to the Law on Nonprofit Organizations to make it easier for the nonprofits to operate, because there have been quite a lot of complaints about the basic law. (Incidentally, these issues were amongst those actively debated at an international conference on nonprofit law in late April in Moscow, which I took part in: http://www.kabaeva.alina.ru/sovet/civilsociety/269/ ). Actually, I have a particular and purely practical interest in the subject of nonprofit organizations, because I head a charity of my own. And when I was registering it and filling in all the forms (all charities have the status of nonprofit organizations) I came up against all sorts of problems, both big and small. So, naturally, I was very keen to take part in the debate on amendments to the nonprofits law not just as a legislator, but also as someone with a vested interest.

I studied all the pre-read for the meeting very closely and consulted a lot with the lawyers. The new law had clearly been thoroughly drafted, but I still picked up a few points that I decided to bring to the attention of my fellow deputies. To an outsider, these may have looked insignificant, but in real life they could be a pain.

What I liked most of all about the new law is that a nonprofit organization can no longer be refused registration just because its documents have not been properly drawn up. And in addition, the authorities can no longer demand documents that are not listed in the law. But the problem is that nowhere is it written down just exactly HOW the documents should be drawn up. So I put forward the following proposal: “Documents submitted by a nonprofit organization for state registration must be drawn up in the proper manner. The procedure for drawing up documents shall be defined by the authorized government body.” (the authorized government body being the Ministry of Justice).

The second point that I thought was important was the fact that the new law abolishes reporting requirements for organizations with an annual budget of no more than 3 million roubles. These organizations now only need to provide notification that they are still operating, either via the internet or in the media. But in small towns and villages it can sometimes be very difficult getting access to the internet. So I think we, the legislators, have to provide the nonprofits with guaranteed access to the internet (even if this access is limited). So I proposed the following wording: “Recommend that the RF Government pass a Resolution “On Providing Assistance with the Free Publication of Information on their Activities as Required by the Law on Nonprofit Organizations on the Internet” (by analogy with similar Resolutions on the publication of information on open tenders and auctions)”.

And finally, the third point was about the number of checks carried out on the nonprofit organizations. Under the new law, they will be checked once every three years (rather once a year, as in the past). This is excellent. But besides the scheduled checks there are all sorts of agencies that carry out their own checks, sometimes in a completely unsystematic way. To protect the nonprofits against all this I suggested adding: “Give nonprofit organizations equal rights with commercial organizations in respect of checks on all matters, not only scheduled checks, especially taking into account that both commercial and nonprofit organizations are legal entities”.

Unfortunately, my amendments and some other suggestions from my colleagues were not accepted by the Duma. As for the new version of the law, it was signed by the President and enacted on 1 August (except for a few clauses that will come into force in January 2010). But I’ll always be able to put forward my amendments to the current law on nonprofit organizations again in the future. The important thing is that the amendments already approved really do improve the existing law at lot. And I’m sure this will be very important for creating a civil society in Russia.