Register of special access – Newspaper Kommersant No. 214 (7415) dated 11/18/2022

The Ministry of Justice has decided on the procedure for the formation and use of a single register of information about persons involved in the activities of extremist or terrorist organizations – a draft of the relevant order has been published on the government information disclosure portal. The list will be closed to the general public: only the election commissions and himself will be able to get information about the presence of a citizen in the register. The expert believes that the described procedure will complicate the already difficult preparation of candidates for the elections, but will add legal certainty.

Both the founders and heads of banned organizations, as well as their members, employees and any other person, “whose involvement in the activities of an extremist or terrorist organization has been established by a court decision that has entered into force,” follows from the published document.

• The register will contain the passport details of the person involved and information about his place of residence, TIN, SNILS, the name of the banned organization and the details of the order of the Ministry of Justice to include him in this list. The latter should be published within ten days from the date of receipt by the agency of information from the competent authorities or a copy of the court decision.
• The registry will be closed to the public. Its maintenance “should be carried out in places inaccessible to unauthorized persons, and in conditions that ensure the prevention of theft, loss, distortion of information,” the draft document says.
• Information from it can be provided at the request of election commissions – to verify information about candidates – or at the request of a citizen if he wants to know if he is in the register.

Recall that the law obliging the Ministry of Justice to maintain a database of extremist materials and a register of persons involved in prohibited activities was adopted by the State Duma in July this year.

The Law on the Prohibition to Hold Elective Offices for Persons Involved in the Activities of Extremist or Terrorist Organizations, was accepted in 2021. Many politicians have already fallen under its influence – most often those who were accused of collaborating with the imprisoned oppositionist Alexei Navalny (three organizations he created were recognized as extremist and banned in Russia). So, the former head of the Krasnoselsky district of Moscow, Ilya Yashin (included in the register of foreign agents) could not take part in the elections to the Moscow City Duma in 2019, and the leader of the Pskov “Yabloko” Lev Shlosberg – in the elections to the State Duma and the regional assembly of deputies in 2021. At the same time, the reason for recognizing both politicians as involved in the activities of the banned organization was participation in public rallies in support of Mr. Navalny.

The register of citizens affiliated with foreign agents will function in a similar way – a draft order on approving the procedure for maintaining this list, as well as the procedure for making a decision on exclusion from it, was published by the Ministry of Justice the day before.

It follows from the document that the register of persons affiliated with foreign agents will also contain complete information about the person, and information from it will be provided to election commissions and individuals themselves.

The concepts of “candidate acting as a foreign agent” and “candidate affiliated with a foreign agent” appeared in the electoral legislation last year. However, the rule providing for the need to maintain a register of the latter, come into force only from December 2022. Uncertainty about the status of potential candidates in the elections has already made itself felt during the recent election campaign. Thus, in July, the district electoral commission did not allow Denis Prokuronov, the current deputy of the Filevsky Park district, to take part in the municipal elections in Moscow, who decided to play it safe and indicate in the documents that he worked with an NGO-foreign agent. However, the election commission, which did not receive confirmation of this information from the Ministry of Justice, decided that the candidate unreasonably called himself an affiliate of a foreign agent and, thereby, provided false information about himself, which became the basis for denial of registration.

The appearance of new registries means that candidates will have significantly more trouble in the elections, political strategist Roman Smirnov warns: now, before the start of the campaign, you will have to “break through” yourself not only according to the records of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but also according to the registers of the Ministry of Justice. The expert notes that such actions will become mandatory for any politician if he is serious about the matter: before drawing up documents, he should definitely find out what information about him is in the databases. Otherwise, any discrepancy with them in his documents may become the basis for refusal of registration. Mr. Smirnov is concerned that the projects of the Ministry of Justice do not specify the deadlines for responding to requests from individuals (in contrast to the deadlines for responding to election commissions, it is ten days). Taking into account the short time that is allotted for the preparation of documents in the conditions of the election campaign, this can become a problem, the expert predicts.

Anastasia Kornya