COUNCIL FOR COOPERATION WITH RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATIONS EXPRESSES SUGGESTIONS ON DRAFT LAWS IN STATE DUMA
Interfax-Religiia, 18 February 2015
Draft laws that have been introduced to the State Duma touching on activity of religious organizations were considered in the first session of the Commission on Improvement of Legislation and Jurisprudence of the Council on Cooperation with Religious Associations of the presidential administration of the RF, which was held in the Kremlin.
Representatives of all religious organizations were seriously concerned by the fact that a new edition of the Civil Code of the RF, which has taken effect, provides for a division of legal persons into corporate and unitary entities. Religious organizations are assigned to the unitary class, whose founders are not parties to them and do not acquire in them the rights of membership, a report on the results of the session received by Interfax on Wednesday notes.
"Such a restriction conflicts with internal canonical constitutions of religious associations. Thus it is important that for the second reading of the bill, being prepared by State Duma deputies (A.D. Zhukov, S.A. Gavrilov, E.B. Mizulina, Ya.E. Nilov, S.A. Popov, and others), suggestions be included aimed at removing contradictions of the essential norms of religion and the law "On freedom of conscience and religious associations," the report says.
Also discussed was a draft law by which it is proposed to introduce a notification procedure for the creation of any religious group, to free religious organizations from annual reporting of information about the continuation of their activity, and to eliminate the necessity of proving the 15-year term of existence of a religious group before state registration.
On the instruction of the president of Russia, the Ministry of Justice worked out a draft law dealing with "preparing a special mechanism of supervision of the financial and economic activity of religious organizations and permitting timely discovery and reaction to incidents of religious organizations' involvement in extremist and terrorist activity, as well as other violations of Russian legislation by religious organizations.
Participants in the session focused attention on assuring that the law fulfilling the tasks posed by the head of state not infringe the rights of religious organizations. (tr. by PDS, posted 18 February 2015)
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