Institute of Democracy and Cooperation

Lecture on NGOs held on 4 May 2009

Publication day: 5/5/2009

On 4 May 2009, the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation in Paris was proud to host Professor Bernard Owen of Université Paris – II to speak on the role played by governmental and non-governmental organisations in the process known as “democratisation”.

Bernard Owen is one of the world’s most experienced observers of elections, having conducted and participated in observation and election missions for the last two decades in various capacities including for the Council of Europe. He currently runs the Centre for the Comparative Study of Elections, the only academic body in France which teaches a course on the subject.

For some time, Professor Owen has been critical of the role played by NGOs in elections and especially of the legal framework within which they are allowed to operate. It was to these two subjects that he addressed himself in his talk.

Professor Owen started by saying drawing attention to the crucial decisions taken on the “human dimension” by the OSCE at its meeting in Copenhagen in June 1990. The conclusions of that meeting, he said, laid down a number of provisions whose importance was perhaps not understood at the time but which have turned out to be highly problematic. In particular, article 10.4 of the document requires (alongside a recital of various well-recognised rights and fundamental freedoms) that member states allow their citizens to create and join non-governmental organisations for the protection of human rights and that they also

"allow members of such groups and organizations to have unhindered access to and communication with similar bodies within and outside their countries and with international organizations, to engage in exchanges, contacts and co-operation with such groups and organizations and to solicit, receive and utilize for the purpose of promoting and protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms voluntary financial contributions from national and international sources as provided for by law."

Some months after the Copenhagen meeting, at its conference in Paris in November 1990, the OSCE created the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) in Warsaw, and this is the now one of the most important bodies which observes elections in Europe. But the Copenhagen document also reflected the thinking expressed in a Council of Europe agreement of 1986, the European Convention on the Recognition of the Legal Personality of International Non-Governmental Organisations. This provides for mutual recognition by states of foreign NGOs on the same terms as national ones.

It is on this legal basis, Owen demonstrated, that organisations operate which are better described as political pressure groups than as neutral NGOs. He singled out for mention the work of Gene Sharp, the noted author of The Politics of Non-Violent Action, who lists 198 methods by which non-violent action may be deployed in the service of political goals. Owen credited Sharp with having inspired the numerous groups which successfully brought about regime change operations in Eastern Europe and the former USSR recently such as Otpor in Serbia in 2000, Kmara in Georgia in 2003 or Pora during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004.

He then discussed the funding of such organisations and of human rights NGOs. As is well known, the United States National Endowment for Democracy provides grants to NGOs involved in elections and human rights, as does USAID. The network of organisations funded by the Open Society Institute of George Soros is also extremely important. Many of the organisations which receive money from these sources are in fact pressure groups, not neutral or technical bodies. As such, Owen argued, they should be treated (and should behave) like political parties not charitable foundations.

Owen said that it is highly desirable that the relevant international texts be changed to reflect the reality of these organisations’ behaviour. It is much more important for the international community to favour and encourage the role of political parties than of NGOs, since it is political parties which are and should be the agents of political change, not organisations which are perhaps funded from abroad and which do not themselves stand for election.

There was an extremely lively debate which lasted for 1½ hours after Owen had finished speaking. Natalia Narochnitskaya, the President of the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, pointed out that many of the themes in Owen’s talk were dealt with by the various authors who had contributed to the book “Orange Networks” published by the IDC and the Foundation for Historical Outlook in 2008 in Russian.

The meeting was exceptionally well attended. Some 50 people crowded into the Institute’s premises and there was standing room only. Attendees included two officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (one from the Russia desk, one from the Department of Cooperation); an official from the Prime Minister’s office (the Institute’s neighbour in rue de Varenne), an official from the Secrétariat Général des Affaires Européennes (the body which reports on European matters directly to the Prime Minister), and a number of journalists, students, and representatives of various professional and political organisations.