Carney responds to question about Snowden meeting with human rights groups.

[struggle4progress]

14. Laws of Attrition: Crackdown on Russia’s Civil Society after Putin’s Return to the Presidency

APRIL 24, 2013

In the year since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in May 2012, the Russian government has unleashed a crackdown on civil society unprecedented in the country’s post-Soviet history. The authorities have introduced a series of restrictive laws, harassed, intimidated, and in several cases imprisoned political activists, interfered in the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and sought to cast government critics as clandestine enemies, thereby threatening the viability of Russia’s civil society ...

... the “foreign agents” law ..., a new law regulating NGOs, requires, among other things, organizations that receive foreign funding and supposedly engage in “political activities” to register as “foreign agents.” ... A third law, the treason law, expands the legal definition of treason in ways that could criminalize involvement in international human rights advocacy ...

In addition, libel, decriminalized at the end of Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency, was recriminalized seven months later, and Internet content has been subjected to new legal restrictions. A new assembly law imposes limits on public demonstrations and imposes serious, drastic fines on those who violate the law.

The new laws, most of them sponsored by the ruling United Russia party, were adopted at breakneck speed: the assembly law, for example, entered into force just 18 days after the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, began debating it ...

http://www.hrw.org/node/115058/section/2