The HRC recommended that officials be imprisoned for 15 days for violating the housing rights of orphans

The Presidential Council for Human Rights (HRC) recommended that law enforcement agencies hold officials administratively liable for unjustified denial of housing to orphans. In particular, civil servants, including the mayor of the city, should be placed under administrative arrest, Izvestia reports with reference to HRC member Yevgeny Bobrov.

In Moscow, according to the council, from 2014 to 2016, 90 decisions of the commission to provide orphans with the housing they were entitled to by law were challenged. Experts believe that there are many more such refusals, but not all orphans go to court. Often they are trying to return them to apartments with parents who have been deprived of parental rights, or to premises that are not suitable for living space standards, or to apartments with strangers.

Most of the decisions were made in favor of the orphans, but the problem is that officials often delay the implementation of decisions. The HRC member emphasized that for such violations of the law and failure to comply with court decisions, the law allows officials to be placed under administrative arrest.

“I believe that sometimes there are grounds to bring them to criminal responsibility - sometimes you can find elements of a crime in their actions,” Bobrov commented.

The head of the charity center “Complicity in Fate,” Alexey Golovan, who previously held the post of children’s ombudsman in Moscow, and then under the President of Russia, noted that until 2013 “such an outrage did not exist”: previously in the capital one or two decisions were appealed annually, but now up to 50. In 2016, the commission also postponed consideration of cases under various pretexts, the social activist added.

“It’s bad that we force orphans to exercise their constitutional right to housing in court. This has become common practice. Representatives of the commission tell the orphans that if they don’t like something, they should go to court. But it’s not so simple, it’s a difficult test,” said Alexey Golovan.

As for orphans taken into Moscow families from other regions, they are offered housing where they came from, which causes criticism from human rights activists. “According to the law, the child’s place of residence is the place of residence of his legal representatives for the entire period of guardianship and trusteeship. And if, at the end of guardianship, he does not leave for the region from which he was taken, Moscow remains his place of residence. This is the position of the Supreme Court, which is based on the norms of civil and family law,” Golovan emphasized. Member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation Yulia Zimova added that the law does not establish how long a child must live in a region in order to receive an apartment there.

A working meeting of the HRC and representatives of the Prosecutor General's Office, the Investigative Committee, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Economics and Development will take place in February. Yevgeny Bobrov said that the council would recommend that security forces bring officials “up to city mayors” to administrative responsibility and even administrative arrest for unfounded refusals to provide housing to orphans.

Earlier, in 2016, in the Chelyabinsk Kunashak municipal district, the administration, when buying a house for an orphan, purchased a building made of railway sleepers without running water or sewerage. Previously, in the Chelyabinsk region, officials denied an orphan the right to housing because the girl already had registration. The orphan repeatedly appealed to officials, explaining that she could not live at her place of registration: the apartment had no windows, doors, the floor was partially broken and the stove was destroyed. As it turned out, the owner of the apartment was the administration of the Oktyabrsky district itself.

Housing for orphans is often used by officials in fraudulent schemes, but such stories rarely reach the court. It was previously reported that in the Perm Territory, an official selected apartments whose cost was significantly lower than payments under housing certificates, and then convinced orphans that they needed this particular housing, keeping silent about the actual funds allocated. In Transbaikalia, officials also moved a graduate of an orphanage into a dilapidated barracks built in 1939, while doubling the cost of housing.

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