New restrictions on foreign NGOs

China has not had regulations allowing for the registration of foreign nongovernment organizations, so almost all such groups have been operating here in a legal gray area. Foreign legal experts say China should have a law that approves the work of such groups. But from a civil society perspective, they say, it makes no sense for the Ministry of Public Security, rather than the Civil Affairs Ministry, to be the regulator.

A few foreign nongovernment groups, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, do operate with official sanction in China now, but they will still need to comply with the mandatory police registration.

Certain types of nongovernment organizations — like groups that work with Chinese human rights activists or lawyers — will have little chance of finding an official partner or registering with the police. One example is the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, which a Chinese lawyer and a Swedish resident of Beijing founded seven years ago and registered as a business in Hong Kong.

The group offered legal training and assistance programs, supporting activist lawyers and grass-roots lawsuits against officials. In recent months, the police dismantled the group by arresting members. The Swede Peter Dahlin was detained in January and forced to make a televised confession of so-called crimes before being deported.

Beijing is already suspicious of foreign and Chinese nongovernment organizations that receive funding from outside sources deemed politically suspect, like the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Foundations, both based in the United States. Groups that operate here with any financing from those sources will be even more vulnerable under the new law. The passage of the law also raises questions of whether more mainstream foreign nongovernment organizations will independently decide to cut certain programs, like initiatives promoting government transparency, or self-censor to secure a Chinese partner and register with the police.

There has been a heated debate this month over whether the American Bar Association withdrew an offer to publish a proposed book by Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer, to avoid any potential fallout from the Chinese government. The bar association has a small office in Beijing that runs a rule-of-law program, although the headquarters said in a statement on Monday that its employees in China had no say in the decision.

/r/China Thread Parent Link - nytimes.com