חוק חובת גילוי לגבי מי שנתמך על ידי ישות מדינית זרה (תיקון), התשע"ו-2016Law Disclosure Requirement Regarding Recipients of Support from Foreign Government Entity (Amendment), 2016 · automatic translation · suggest a correction

Official summary of the law (Knesset)

The Duty of Disclosure for Those Supported by a Foreign Political Entity Law (Amendment), 2016 establishes enhanced reporting and disclosure obligations on associations and public benefit companies whose main funding comes from foreign political entities. The Law establishes an annual duty to report the main funding source to the Registrar of Associations or Endowments, as applicable. The Registrar shall publish a list of associations and companies whose main funding is as described, and they shall publish this fact on their website. The Law also establishes disclosure duties to be imposed on those associations and companies for a period of one year from the date of reporting: a duty to state the fact that their main funding is as described in publications related to promoting the association's goals that are intended and available to the public, in letters from the association to public officials and elected officials, and in reports that the association publishes to the public. In addition, it is provided that a representative of an association or company whose main funding is as described, who speaks at a Knesset committee meeting, shall be required to bring this fact to the attention of the committee chairperson, and if during the meeting they are asked by a Knesset member whether they are a representative of an association or company whose main funding is as described, they shall be required to answer.

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Sponsors

Bezalel Smotrich, David Amsalem, Robert Ilatov, Menachem Eliezer Moses, Hamad Amar

What was said in the plenum

The law requires associations whose funding comes mainly from foreign state entities to report this to the Registrar of Associations and to inform members of Knesset and elected officials, in the name of the principle of transparency. The debate focused on whether the law's purpose is indeed to increase transparency or to politically persecute and unilaterally mark left-wing and human rights associations, as opposed to the absence of a parallel disclosure requirement for donations from private sources.

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An automatic summary of the plenum transcripts: the debate on the bill at every reading it was voted on. Arguments are given as the speakers made them; this is not an assessment. The list of speakers comes from the transcript, without a model. A very long debate: every speech was shortened to the same length before summarising. Transcripts of the sittings: 1, 2

Reservations to the second reading

54 reservations were filed: proposed changes to the text the committee brought to the second and third reading.

The reservations were intended to extend the law's application to foreign private entities as well, and not only to foreign political entities, to change or delete the obligations of public labeling and marking of supported bodies, and to postpone the law's effective date, on the claim that the law constitutes political persecution of human rights and civil society organizations.

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By faction

• Joint List opposition · 54 reservations · 13 members
• Yesh Atid opposition · 54 reservations · 11 members
• Zionist Union opposition · 53 reservations · 24 members
• Meretz opposition · 44 reservations · 5 members

A joint reservation counts for every faction whose members filed it.

Asked to speak: Oren Asaf Hazan (Likud), Robert Ilatov (Yisrael Beytenu), Bezalel Smotrich (Jewish Home)

Proposers and reservation numbers are extracted automatically from the committee version, and the count is checked against the numbers printed in it. The descriptions are an automatic summary. Committee version for the second and third reading (PDF)