Today is an important day: the lawyers for the Progress Party have submitted 43 certificates confirming the registration of our regional branches to the Ministry of Justice. Under the law, it is from this very day—the day the registration documents are filed with the relevant authorities—that the party is entitled to nominate candidates in elections.
Several top “experts” (these and these, for example) have confidently declared that the Progress Party has no chance of succeeding and, in fact, has already been dissolved.
We are tired of this, so we want to put an end to the legal debate by clearly explaining what will actually happen to the Progress Party now and exactly which legal provisions govern its existence.
As I have written many times, Clause 4 of Article 15 of Federal Law No. 95-FZ of July 11, 2001, “On Political Parties,” provides for a six-month period for registering branches. Within six months, the party must be registered in half of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation.
Clause 6 of the same law adds that after the six-month period expires, the party has one additional month to submit the registration certificates to the authorized authorities.
And Clause 7 states that the deadlines for registering branches may be extended if registration has been suspended somewhere, or if a refusal is being appealed.
Several things are important here. First, the law says that the deadlines are extended in general—for all branches—even if something went wrong in just one of them. Second, under the law, the registration period is not divided into a primary and an additional one, just as registered branches are not divided into first- and second-class categories. The Ministry of Justice clearly understands this, since it has continued registering our branches as if nothing had happened.
If you assume that the registration period is extended only for those regions where registration has been suspended or a court case is underway, then it becomes unclear what to do about Clause 6 and that final one-month deadline. Suppose you spend a long time appealing a refusal in court, but in the end the registration is признана valid. You come to the Ministry of Justice to submit all 43 of your certificates, only to find out that because of the lengthy court proceedings, the filing deadline has already passed and nothing can be done.
And for everyone who has already declared us dissolved, let me clarify: a party that has submitted its registration certificates to the “federal authorized body” can be dissolved only by a decision of the Supreme Court, not by some Ministry of Justice official who feels like interpreting the law in his own way.
I hope that after this clarification, the stream of conflicting interpretations will stop, and the Progress Party will be able to continue its work calmly, take part in elections, and win them.
Don’t forget to vote in support of our initiative to ratify Article 20 of the UN Convention against Corruption and to add an “Illicit Enrichment” article to the Criminal Code. This is one of the Progress Party’s key platform demands. Yesterday, we worked well together and have already collected 27,000 votes. We need 100,000.