International Foundation for Civil Liberties
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The International Foundation for Civil Liberties (Russian: Международный фонд гражданских свобод) is a non-profit organization established by the Russian-British oligarch Boris Berezovsky in November 2000.[1][2][3] The foundation is headquartered in New York City and headed by Alexander Goldfarb.[4][5][6] The stated mission of the foundation is "to provide financial, legal, informational and logistical resources to secure human rights and civil liberties in Russia." [7]
The first grant of the foundation ($3 million) was given as an endowment for the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Civic Center in Moscow. The grant was accepted by Sakharov's widow Elena Bonner.[8][9] By May 2001, 160 more grants have been awarded by the foundation to NGOs which claim to be engaged in "human rights protection across Russia"[10][11] including Committees of Soldiers' Mothers, a network labeled as a "foreign agent" by the Russian government.[12][13] Among other IFCL projects in Russia, observers noted support of anti-government journalists, soldiers and funding lawyers to defend youth offenders.[14]
As part of its campaign to highlight violations of human rights in Chechnya, jointly with British-based Amnesty International and the International Helsinki Federation, IFCL sponsored screening of documentaries on the Chechen War around the world.[15][16] and took out full-page advertisements in international press criticising the human rights record of president Vladimir Putin.[17] IFCL promoted the film Assassination of Russia, which forwards a conspiracy theory that the FSB security service staged the Moscow apartment bombings as a false flag, which led to the Second Chechen war.[18]
On the eve of the 2006 meeting of G8 Club of industrial nations in St. Petersburg, IFCL launched mocking advertisements depicting Vladimir Putin as Groucho Marx.[19][20] Among their other activities, they paid legal expenses of the Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev in his successful bid against extradition request from Russia.[21] They have been a major sponsor of transcribing the so-called Kuchma tapes—recordings in the office of the Ukrainian president made by Major Mykola Melnychenko[22][23] and contributed at least $21 million to Ukrainian opposition in support of the Orange Revolution.[24] They supported Alexander Litvinenko through a resettlement grant that paid for rent of his two-bedroom apartment in UK.[8] Their director Alex Goldfarb who had arranged Litvinenko’s defection from Moscow in 2000[25] became prominent as a spokesman for Litvinenko after his poisoning and death.[26][27]
After the killing of Alexander Litvinenko, probably authorized by the Kremlin, IFCL seems to have folded down its public activities. The foundation's web site has not been updated since 2006.[28]