Responsibility will be added to foreign agents – Newspaper Kommersant No. 163 (7364) dated 09/06/2022

The State Duma Commission on Combating Foreign Interference approved on Monday the concept of amendments to the Code of Administrative Offenses (CAO), providing for the introduction of fines for foreign agents for interfering in elections. Such a ban has been in effect for more than a year and a half, but so far no sanctions have been provided for its violation. Experts do not yet undertake to assess what kind of actions will be recognized as punishable. However, the Federation Council has already counted ten types of interference in elections.

On September 5, the State Duma Commission for Investigating the Interference of Foreign States in the Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation approved the concept of a bill that introduces fines for violations by foreign agents of the electoral law. As the head of the commission Vasily Piskarev (United Russia) told journalists on Monday, the deputies propose to introduce into Art. 19.34 of the Code of Administrative Offenses amendments providing for administrative liability for interference in elections by foreign agents. According to him, the size of the fine is proposed to be set at a rate of 10,000 to 30,000 rubles. for individuals, up to 500 thousand rubles for officials and up to 1 million rubles for legal entities.

No new restrictions will be introduced into the electoral legislation, Igor Borisov, a member of the Central Election Commission (CEC), who took part in a meeting of the Duma commission, explained to Kommersant.

The ban on the activities of foreign agents, “promoting or hindering” the nomination and election of candidates, as well as the “achievement of a certain result in the elections”, has already provided the law on basic guarantees of the rights of citizens, he recalls. It’s just that until now there have been no sanctions for violating such a ban and it has not been prosecuted by law, but now “processes are aggravating” and preventive measures have to be introduced, Mr. Borisov notes. He emphasizes that during the current election campaign, foreign agents are not threatened with fines for interfering in elections – most likely, their introduction will coincide in time with the entry into force of the law that provides for the creation of a unified register of foreign agents (the law “On Control over the Activities of Persons Under Foreign influence”, summarizing all the rules on foreign agents, will come into force on December 1, 2022).

What kind of actions can be interpreted as activities “facilitating or hindering” the nomination or election of candidates, Igor Borisov does not undertake to assume: this is a matter of substantive assessment in each specific case, he is convinced.

“I’m afraid that now no one can say for sure,” electoral lawyer Roman Smirnov agrees. prosecutor’s office.” For example, the report of the Golos movement (included by the Ministry of Justice in the register of foreign agents) can be recognized as an attempt to influence, if it contains an assessment of the activities of the subjects of the election campaign, the expert argues. In any case, in his opinion, at first the practice will not be widespread and will differ from region to region, and some generalizations and the emergence of established patterns should only be expected by the single voting day-2023. However, in general, the trend is obvious: foreign influence is recognized as a negative factor and it will be limited, sums up Mr. Smirnov.

It should be noted that now the interim commission of the Federation Council for the Protection of State Sovereignty regularly reports on the facts of interference in Russian elections. Thus, following the results of the 2021 parliamentary campaign, senators identified ten main types of outside interference in elections. Among them, in particular, are attempts to impose “proteges of the West” as candidates, the dissemination of one-sided information about the course of the elections in foreign and pro-Western media, calls for non-recognition of the election results even before the start of voting, illegal campaigning by foreign agents, the production of “fakes” for discrediting Russian elections, etc.

Recently, the Ministry of Justice has recognized as foreign agents many oppositionists who actively participated in elections as candidates or organizers of election campaigns. Among them are former Moscow municipal deputies Maxim Katz, Yulia Galyamina and Ilya Yashin, as well as almost all the closest associates of the imprisoned politician Alexei Navalny, who ran for the Moscow City Duma and the State Duma.

Maxim Katz explains the emergence of new amendments by the fact that “most of the successful opposition election campaigns were led by people who are now recognized as foreign agents.”

He himself in 2017, together with politician Dmitry Gudkov supervised project “United Democrats”, which allowed the opposition to get several hundred seats in the municipal elections in Moscow. But the entry into force of the bill will not affect his personal political activity, Mr. Katz is sure: “For the first time in the last ten years, I am not participating in election campaigns. Now there are very big risks for opposition candidates, and I cannot invite people to participate in the elections. Now, simply for the very fact of our political position (meaning criticism of the special operation in Ukraine. – “Kommersant”), criminal prosecution is provided. Therefore, I am not currently involved in elections, but if the situation changes, a potential fine will not stop me in any way, especially since I am not in Russia.”

The proposed norm of the Code of Administrative Offenses is formulated so vaguely that almost any action can be interpreted as interference in the elections – organization of observation, work in election headquarters, and even expression of sympathy for one of the candidates on social networks, lawyer Anastasia Burakova believes. However, this is a general law enforcement trend of recent times, the expert notes: who and for what will be punished depends more on the political situation, and not on the content of a particular violation.

Anastasia Kornya, Kira Heifetz