Russian Court Overturns Foreign Agent Status of Russian Election Watchdog Golos

The Moscow City Court has overturned a Russian government decision labeling the Golos Association, Russia’s preeminent election monitoring group, a “foreign agent.”

Golos was the first nongovernmental organization the Ministry of Justice classified in this manner under the 2012 “Foreign Agent Law” for purportedly receiving foreign funding and conducting loosely-defined “political activity.”  As a result, in 2013, Golos was fined 400 thousand Russian rubles ($10,800) for failure to declare itself a foreign agent. Throughout the process, Golos has maintained that it had ceased to receive foreign funding after the passage of the law.

The Moscow City Court’s Sept. 8 ruling confirms that Golos’s inclusion in the registry was unfounded, and orders the Ministry of Justice to return the fines paid by Golos last year. The decision comes after 18 months of legal action by Golos, which notified the Ministry of Justice about the ruling on September 9. The ministry has not yet removed Golos from the foreign agent registry.

Lilia Shibanova, director of the Golos Association from 2001-2012, said that the organization’s recent struggles left it “more experienced and more motivated to protect electoral rights in Russia.”

Golos documented widespread fraud during the 2011 parliamentary and 2012 presidential elections in Russia.  Its map of electoral violations, accessed by thousands of Russian and international Internet users, provided innovative visualization of crowdsourced data from trained citizen monitors of gross manipulation of the country’s electoral process.

Published Sept. 12, 2014