To teach or not to teach?

On September 1, not everyone will go to Russian schools. Many have been denied an admission to school due to the lack of registration (according to the old-registration) or other documents that directors are obliged to demand from children and parents and without which they do not have the right to accept the child-even if they really want. Human rights activists of "civil assistance" reached the Supreme Court, appealing the requirements of the order of the Ministry of Education and Science on the need to confirm the legal status of parents and registration of children when admitting to school. In court, the plaintiffs said that the requirements of this order violate one of the basic rights of the child - the right to primary and secondary education, guaranteed by the Russian Constitution and the UN Rights Convention. At the very end of August, they were refused by the Supreme Court - hopes for admitting children without registration in schools in the beginning school year did not materialize.

The position of the court seemed to me a friend - the court recognized the legality of both an order directly violating the rights of children and the indisputability of children's right to education, which cannot be violated. This practice has long developed in the wisdom of Russian senior courts - in the supreme, which is in constitutional: not to recognize a violation of the rights of obviously anti -constitutional norms and laws, while claiming complete commitment to law and all obligations. So the opinion of the courts, the Ministry of Education, officials - how far from the rights of the child it was - is no longer surprising. However, in fact, it boils down to the support of unlawful actions of the authorities.

The news of the complaint about the order of the Ministry of Education, introducing the requirement of registering children at the place of residence to the school, caused a violent reaction: human rights defenders showered with reproaches, they say, “our children” will suffer when “20 migrants” come to the class. The deep conviction is expressed that the Russian Constitution guarantees the rights of only citizens of their country, which means that it does not give children and non-citizens the right to study in our schools. But the Constitution in many cases - especially when it comes to basic rights - concerns all people in the Russian Federation, which the Constitutional Court noted in a special decision back in 1998: "Foreign citizens and stateless persons enjoy rights in the Russian Federation and are obliged to citizens of the Russian Federation."

Unfortunately, the rights of migrant children are violated in the Russian Federation not only by orders of the Ministry of Education with a request for mandatory registration at the place of residence. Even if we talk only about those who fulfill all the requirements of the “legal stay in the Russian Federation” (and, according to the head of the Federal Migration Service, Konstantin Romodanovsky, more than 10 million migrants are now “legally” in the Russian Federation), the rights of migrant children are systematically violated by the law “On the Legal Status of Foreign Citizens”. This law limits the term of stay in the Russian Federation by 90 days out of 180 those migrants who do not have a permit for employment in Russia, that is, applies to all minors - after all, it is impossible to officially get to work under 18 years of age.

Families of migrants with children are condemned either to refuse to attempt to receive a school education, or to violate the law by falsifying the migration documents of children

It turns out that, even if the family of migrants fulfills absolutely all the requirements of the law - he lives at the place of registration, adults work according to correctly executed agreements and patents, leave the Russian Federation and undergo re -registration - they are still obliged to spend more than three months in the Russian Federation, and leave the country for the next three months. And here we are not talking about some kind of legal lacuna or shortage in the legislation, but about the conscious position of those on whom the fate of the children of migrants depends. The lawyers of our organization - the Anti -Discrimination Center "Memorial " - have repeatedly tried to achieve the recognition of the right of children who legally live and working in St. Petersburg migrants for life with their parents in the Russian Federation, but each time they were refused. So, to a request for citizens of Uzbekistan, who have been legally lived in the Russian Federation for more than 7 years and asked the children not to leave the country every three months, from the Federal Migration Service in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, they answered: “In connection with the issuance of a permit for a temporary resolution for temporary accommodation, permission to resolve, permission to be issued to the legal representative of the residence permit. work or patent. " Thus, the families of migrants with children will be found either to refuse to attempts to receive a school education, or to violate the law by fake children's migration documents.

However, to legalize the children of foreigners on the basis of permissions for temporary residence and legal work of their parents is a very moderate requirement. After all, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes the right of every minor to school education - completely independently of the status, citizenship, the "legality" of being in the country. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child a year ago called on the authorities of the Russian Federation to cancel the restriction of the term of stay in the Russian Federation of children of migrants 90 days, as this violates their right to life in a family with parents and the right to receive education in Russian schools.

For the Committee on the Rights of the Child, there is no concept of "illegality" of minor migrants, as well as for the European Court of Human Rights. Most European countries were forced to recognize the right of children to study at school, regardless of the grounds for finding these children in the country.

For all the rigidity of the policy of the European Union, in relation to the all kinds of economic migrants (often coming to the EU without any documents), the right of children to education and life in the family is almost always formally observed. This means that children are taken to schools and are not trying to expel from the country separately from their parents. But if there is a court decision on the expulsion of the whole family and if this family manages to detain all together, then expulsion becomes legally possible. Migrants who are afraid of deportations can send children to schools, but they are afraid to lead them or to lead them - after all, here the police can detain them with the children. There is a risk that children will not study if parents can’t bring them to school. This situation worries both teachers who understand how important it is to teach children with a difficult fate and indifferent citizens of prosperous countries. Society rebels against violation of children's rights even in such an indirect form as the risk of abandoning the school of fearful expulsion of parents. In France, many teachers and parents combined in motion to save the children of migrants: in order to maintain the possibility of visiting schools by children, parents of their classmates with legal status, take turns taking away children from newly accumulated families and take it to their home, saving these families from expulsion, and children - from loss of access to schools.

And the Russian “progressive public” does not even believe that they take children to European schools without registration ... And “20 migrants in the class” are afraid of “20 migrants, although it would be necessary to be afraid of the savagery and cruelty of those who do not give children to study.

Stefania Kulaeva - expert of the anti -discrimination center "Memorial"