The Ministry of Internal Affairs proposed introducing temporary passports for stateless persons

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs is developing a bill providing for the introduction of a temporary passport for stateless persons. This was announced in an interview with Interfax by the head of the Main Directorate for Migration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Olga Kirillova.

According to her, work is underway on the draft Federal Law "On Amending Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation in terms of resolving the legal status of stateless persons." A special identity document, "with which they will be able to live in Russia, work and further acquire Russian citizenship, will be introduced for citizenship persons.

Kirillova clarified that at present in Russia there are several tens of thousands of former citizens of the USSR, living in Russia for more than 15 years and for various reasons that have not managed to become citizens of Russia. The stateless persons also include those who are freed from places of imprisonment and who arrived in Russia in childhood.

In addition, she clarified that in 2014-2017 and the first half of 2018, the citizenship of the Russian Federation acquired more than 312 thousand citizens of Ukraine: the largest share of foreign citizens who arrive in Russia annually accounted for. At the moment, about two million Ukrainians are in Russia.

Currently, there are no mechanisms in migration legislation to regulate the status of such stateless persons, since they have no reason to be adopted in Russian citizenship. “At the same time, these people, as a rule, do not have a place of residence and a certain kind of occupation in the Russian Federation, cannot be socialized. Including, due to the lack of the opportunity to legalize in the country,” Kirillova added. The developed federal law must replenish this gap.

At the end of last year, the Ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova reported that from 2000 to 4,000 people in Crimea live without citizenship, and proposed solving the issue of the Apatrides at the legislative level. She found it difficult to accurately name the number of people living in Russia without a passport. “No one can accurately name the figure. 20 thousand - information that is in the FMS: so many passports were canceled. But with the last census of the population, about a million citizens said that they did not have identity documents,” the Ombudsman said.

Moskalkova said that "in relation to respectable citizens" who do not have citizenship, a "passport amnesty" should be carried out. "We are talking about those citizens who have been canceled passports obtained in violation of the order established by law, as a rule, in the 1990s. The people who fell into this situation came to me on this subject and human rights activists. Unfortunately, work on the registry of these persons was not completed and their exact number is not yet known," she said.