Prosecutors and tax police target human rights group and other organisations amid fears searches are aimed at stifling dissent

This article is more than 7 years old

This article is more than 7 years old

Russian prosecutors and tax police have searched the Moscow headquarters of Amnesty International and several other rights groups, continuing a wave of pressure that activists say is part of President Vladimir Putin's attempt to stifle dissent.

Sergei Nikitin, Amnesty's Russia chief, said officials from the general prosecutor's office and tax police conducted an unannounced audit of his offices and requested documents that the government already had on file.

They were accompanied by journalists from the state-controlled NTV television station, which has been used by the Kremlin for hatchet jobs against its political foes.

Other rights groups were also subject to searches. The veteran activist Lev Ponomarev's For Human Rights movement was visited by officials and an NTV crew on Monday. He wrote a letter to the Moscow prosecutor's office calling the search illegal, since prosecutors had provided no evidence that his organisation had broken the law.

Public Verdict, a human rights law group, was also searched on Monday.

Putin has long been suspicious of non-governmental organisations, especially those with American funding, which he has accused of being fronts for US meddling in Russian politics.

After Putin returned to the presidency in May, parliament rubber-stamped a Kremlin-backed law requiring all NGOs that receive foreign funding to register as "foreign agents", a term that many Russians find pejorative.

Russian officials have searched up to 2,000 NGOs in the past month, according to Pavel Chikov, a member of the presidential human rights council. The searches began after Putin gave a speech urging the Federal Security Service to focus attention on groups receiving foreign funding, which he said were "putting pressure on Russia".

The justice ministry said earlier this year that the policy was unenforceable, but on Monda it told the Interfax news agency that the searches were being carried out in line with the foreign agents law.

Chikov said many organisations had been checked under another, vaguely worded law on "extremism", including by agencies that have nothing to do with enforcing it, such as the fire service and the health department.

The US embassy, Amnesty, the presidential human rights council and Public Verdict have all expressed concern over the searches.