The summons will be for this week. Former Foreign Minister Luis Gonzales Posada and former Vice Chancellors Eduardo Ponce and Hugo de Zela, in an interview with Perú21, considered that the Foreign Relations Commission should summon the head of Torre Tagle, Elmer Schialer, so that he can receive complaints from legislators. of pressure from foreign countries so that the law that will supervise NGOs is not voted on or approved in the Plenary.
This is because, according to Peru21 sources, tomorrow, Tuesday, the aforementioned commission would issue, at the beginning of its extraordinary session, a statement rejecting the interference of foreign countries in the voting of that law through telephone calls and visits to congressmen, as stated. this newspaper revealed last week.
LOOK: They denounce international pressure in voting on a law that controls NGOs
Last Thursday, as recalled, congressmen Alejandro Aguinaga, from Fuerza Popular, and Américo Gonza, from Perú Libre, denounced that there are representatives of foreign countries who have been calling on the phone and have visited legislators to abort the approval of said law. , which establishes transparency mechanisms for NGOs about the funds they receive and their destination.
Aguinaga indicated on that occasion that, despite the fact that Canada has approved a rule against foreign interference in July of this year, “we see that its representatives are calling (congressmen to pressure for the law).”
CANADA IN THE SIGHT
The chancellor’s summons will allow us to know from the legislators themselves whether the ambassadors of Canada, the United States and Great Britain, or their intermediaries, have been part of that pressure.
However, according to Gonzales Posada, the Foreign Ministry had already called the Canadian ambassador, Louis Marcotte, to ask for an explanation for the complaints.
“I understand that the Foreign Ministry has already summoned the Canadian ambassador. So, the mechanism is the following: the resolution that is approved in the Foreign Relations Commission of Congress must be sent to the Foreign Ministry so that it, in turn, sends that note of protest to the embassies involved,” he said. .
“We have several actors,” said Gonzales Posada. Canada on the one hand, Great Britain on the other, and openly the United States, which a day or two ago expressed itself harshly through two senators (Ben Cardin and Tim Kaine), who say that approving this rule is ‘betraying the democratic traditions of Peru’. A nonsense, because in the United States, for example, there is a specific law called the Foreign Agents Registration Law, where any donation has to be scrutinized and it has to be said what the functionality is, and the same thing happens in all those countries. that they are demanding.”
VOTE IN
THE PLENARY
The secretary of the Foreign Relations Commission, Juan Carlos Lizarzaburu, from the APP bench, told Perú21 that he will support the summons of the chancellor and the director of the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation (APCI), and announced that his bench will vote for favor of that law.
On the other hand, the president of Congress, Eduardo Salhuana, who is from the Lizarzaburu bench, has not yet put the law that will supervise NGOs to a vote, despite the fact that it has been on the Plenary agenda since Wednesday.
I KNEW THAT
-The legal opinion is an accumulation of six bills from the benches of Perú Libre, Podemos, Renovación Popular, APP and Fuerza Popular.
-According to Aguinaga, there is 500 million dollars of non-reimbursable international cooperation to NGOs, and only 5% is audited.
-The Permanent Commission could vote on the law if the Plenary does not do so.
-“The essential thing is that congressmen are clear that it is unacceptable for them to receive pressure from a foreign country or from anyone,” said former vice chancellor Hugo de Zela.
Former Foreign Minister Luis Gonzales Posada: “Blow to national sovereignty”
“Transparency is necessary, through this law, because donations from NGOs are exempt from taxes; that is, the State cannot be exempt from oversight and this simply means requiring that NGOs register with the APCI, which Most of them are not. There are very few NGOs that are registered, and they have not reported the resources raised. It is said that last year it was 400 million dollars, we do not know. So, what we want here is transparency. and not the meddling of foreign countries, and I am very sorry that this is happening.
Like the chancellor, the director of the APCI, Noela Pantoja, must be summoned to the Foreign Relations Commission, and the bill must move forward until it is voted on. There must be transparency and not darkness. Ambassadors and countries cannot interfere with this law. “It is a blow to national sovereignty.”
