Published 22 March 2023 at 16.39
Foreign. The “anti-racist” Russian organization Sova center, which corresponds to the extreme left Expo, is to be disbanded. This is the decision of the Moscow City Court, the organization writes in a press release.
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Sova center has 12 employees and has cooperated with other similar organizations outside Russia .
On their website, they write that they are financed by several foreign states and international left-wing organizations, such as financial billionaire George Soros' foundation Open Society.
Another donor is the Swedish Civil Rights Defenders, which in in turn, the Swedish state is financed and receives over SEK 80 million from the Swedish taxpayers every year.
However, there is also a domestic financier on the list: the Russian Jewish Congress.
Foreign-funded organizations in Russia since 2012 must register as foreign agents. Since 2016, the Sova Center has been classified as a foreign agent by the Russian Ministry of Justice.
The Department has now requested that the Sova Center be forced to cease operations immediately due to its participation in events outside the Moscow region on 24 occasions where they are registered.
Aleksandr Verchovskij, Sova center's director and most visible face, tells the far-left Expo that the decision is “ridiculous”:
– The law says that a regional organization is operating in the region where it is registered, in our case Moscow. Now people have suddenly started to interpret this literally, meaning that you can only be active where you are registered. It is ridiculous, of course.
He promises that the so-called anti-racist work will continue anyway and that he intends to find some new legal form to make this possible.