Russian officials searched the offices of Amnesty International on Monday as prosecutors stepped up a controversial drive to catalogue hundreds of non-governmental organisations deemed to be "foreign agents" for receiving funding from abroad. The head of Amnesty's Russia branch, Sergei Nikitin, said three prosecutors and a tax official had arrived at its Moscow offices requesting copies of the organisation's charter documents governing their operations in Russia.
The action came on top of searches last week at Memorial, one of Russia's most prominent rights groups, and other raids on Monday at several other organisations including Public Verdict Foundation and For Human Rights Movement. Amnesty said it was told the reason for the inspections was to check compliance with Russian legislation on NGOs and that it "is confident that all its activities comply" with the law. But it voiced concern that "the recent wave of inspections has been carried out in such a way as to deliberately stigmatise and discredit NGOs in the eyes of the public".
Since early March, some 50 rights groups from 16 regions have reported searches, according to Pavel Chikov, head of the Agora rights association, estimating that around 2,000 groups might have been inspected across Russia in total. He told AFP that "the unprecedented scope" of the searches was worrying and indicated that a nation-wide effort to catalogue all groups with foreign funding was under way. After President Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin in May, the Russian parliament fast-tracked a law forcing internationally-funded NGOs involved in politics to carry a "foreign agent" tag.