More Governmental NGOs to Be Established

The draft law “About National State-public associations” has been included into the agenda of the spring session of the Chamber of Representatives. The draft which was elaborated on Lukashenka’s errand provides establishment of pseudo-public structures, controlled and financed by the authorities.

The adversaries of the law believe that the authorities want to revive the public structures of the totalitarian period of Belarusian history.

The head of the parliamentary commission on human rights, national relations and mass media Aliaksandr Sviryd confesses that there hasn’t been such a law in Belarus before, but state-public associations already exist and are a hybrid of state and public property.

The law proposes to confess such organizations as a peculiar kind of non-commercial organizations that are established and liquidated by the supreme organs of state power. The conditions for their establishment are to be defined by president or the parliament, depending on the tasks which the state gives to them, pointed Sviryd.

Among the existing organizations of this kind we can mention Belarusian National Youth Union, women’s and veterans’ unions that execute the official orders and actively delegate their members to election commissions.

The representative of the Assembly of NGOs of Belarus Ales Bialiatski thinks that this draft law witnesses the intention of the authorities to return to the former soviet system of pseudo-public associations:

-- This is the kind of organizations which is completely dependent on the authorities, is financially supported by the state and executes the tasks of the authorities, not of the society.

According to Bialiatski, at the same time the authorities liquidate independent NGOs and refuse to register new ones. According to the monitoring of the executive bureau of the Assembly of NGOs, for the last two years about a hundred of NGOs were closed and several hundred of new ones didn’t receive registration.