ID tag requirement cut from controversial NGO bill
Knesset Law Committee chair agrees to cancel requirement for identifying tags in bill that targets left-wing groups
Coalition lawmakers have reportedly agreed to remove a key contentious clause from a controversial bill on Israeli NGOs funded by foreign governments.
The so-called “NGOs Bill” dramatically — and unfairly, critics have claimed — ups the disclosure requirements for any group that receives more than half its funding from foreign states and international institutions. Nearly all such groups operating in Israel and the Palestinian territories are affiliated with the left.
Jewish Home MK Nissan Slomiansky, who as chair of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee is the lead negotiator on the bill for the government, has agreed to remove one of the most criticized articles in the legislation: the requirement that representatives of such groups wear specially colored security tags while visiting the Knesset or government agencies.
The tags are similar to those worn by journalists and lobbyists in the halls of the Knesset, but critics, including some lawmakers who say they otherwise support the bill, said the special tags seemed intended to humiliate representatives of the organizations.
The concession is not a serious one for the bill’s proponents. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said last year he would prevent the inclusion of the tag requirement, and Slomiansky’s decision on Monday followed criticism of the requirement from coalition lawmakers, not just the left-wing opposition.
The bill’s latest version requires that an NGO report a donation from a foreign government in real time to the Justice Ministry’s nonprofits registrar, and that its organizations’ representatives state — in their meetings with state officials and in all official publications — that they receive most of their funding from foreign states.
According to Channel 2 news, Constitution, Law and Justice Committee members received a legal opinion from the committee’s legal adviser’s office recommending that the stringent transparency stipulations of the bill be applied to donations from private individuals overseas, as well as states, a move that would subject many right-wing advocacy groups to similar requirements.
“Private foreign individuals also have interests,” the opinion reads, and as with foreign governments, “if there is a significant foreign intervention [by individuals] through [Israeli] civil society, the public has the same interest in knowing that.”