Russia's Justice Ministry has deleted 10 NGOs from the list of “foreign agents,” the Gazeta.ru news website reported Monday. Four of them were excluded from the list because they “stopped performing the functions of a foreign agent,” while the other six were removed because they had closed down for good.
The report didn't specify which organizations had been deleted from the list, which currently comprises 94 NGOs.
President Vladimir Putin signed the so-called foreign agents law in 2012, requiring all NGOs that receive funding from abroad and are engaged in political activity to declare that their materials were produced by a “foreign agent,” a term widely associated in Russia with espionage.
The law has been broadly criticized for its loose definition of what constitutes “political activity.”