Politics
Charities told to declare foreign money
New Ministry of Justice rules require every registered charity to report its foreign funding each year. The churches' charities say they are being watched.
From the Irad Times of 10 June 2021.
Every registered charity in the ISEZ will have to report its foreign funding to the Ministry of Justice each year, under rules published by the ministry last week. The rules take effect on 1 September.
Charities must list each foreign donation above 5,000 som, with the name and country of the donor and the purpose of the gift, and the ministry may publish a summary. A charity that fails to report may have its registration suspended.
“International practice”
The Minister of Justice, Kapar Tilekov, said the rules followed “international practice on transparency” and would protect charities “from suspicion”. He said nothing in them restricted what a charity could receive.
Church charities, many of which depend on donations from the Iradi diaspora in Chicago and Texas and from Catholic agencies abroad, see it differently. The director of one parish charity in Talas, which runs a soup kitchen and pays for children's medicines, said the reporting would cost her organisation “a month of a bookkeeper's time we do not have”. “Our donors are grandmothers in Chicago,” she said. “Now the ministry will know their names. Some of them will stop giving.”
Supporters of the Iradi Freedom Society abroad, who fund clinics and schools on the tribal side of the line through registered charities in Talas, called the rules “a means of control”. The ministry said the rules “apply equally to all”.
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