A follower of Said Nursi from Blagoveshchensk is deprived of Russian citizenship

The court decided to expel Yevgeny Kim, who was released from the colony, from the country, since he was deprived of Russian citizenship as convicted under Art. 282.2 of the Criminal Code.

In May 2019, it became known that Yevgeny Kim, a follower of the Annunciation Islamic theologian Said Nursi, was deprived of Russian citizenship and would be expelled from Russia.

On April 10, 2019, he was released from IK-3 in Khabarovsk, where he was serving a term under Part 1 of Art. 282.2 of the Criminal Code (organization of the activities of an extremist organization) and Part 1 of Art. 282 of the Criminal Code (inciting hatred) (we have no information about the change of the sentence due to the partial decriminalization of the latter). The day before his release, his passport was confiscated, and immediately after Kim left the colony, the inspector of the Zheleznodorozhny District Department of the Migration Department of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for Khabarovsk drew up a protocol against him under Part 1.1 of Art. 18.8 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (violation by a stateless person of the regime of stay, expressed in the absence of documents confirming the right to stay). On the same day, the protocol was considered by the Zheleznodorozhny District Court of Khabarovsk, which imposed a fine of 3,000 rubles on Kim and administrative expulsion from Russia. On April 30, the Khabarovsk regional court upheld this decision.

It follows from court rulings that in 2005 the Main Department of Internal Affairs of the Sverdlovsk Region granted the application of Kim, who was born on the territory of the Uzbek SSR and had a Soviet passport, for admission to Russian citizenship. On January 29, 2019, the same regional office declared this decision invalid.

According to the amendments to the law "On Citizenship" adopted in 2017, a court verdict that has entered into force on a number of articles of extremist and terrorist orientation (including under Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code) is equated to the fact of knowingly providing false information about the obligation to comply with the Constitution and laws of the Russian Federation upon entry into citizenship, and therefore may serve as a basis for canceling the decision on admission to citizenship.

Thus, Kim remained stateless. He ended up in the Temporary Detention Center for Foreign Citizens (TsVSIG) of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Khabarovsk Territory. It was assumed that he would be deported to Uzbekistan, despite the fact that he does not have Uzbek citizenship.

Note that in terms of charges under Art. 282.2 of the Criminal Code, we considered Kim's sentence unlawful. We believe that both the ban on Said Nursi's books and the ban on the Nurcular association, which did not exist in Russia at all, are unjustified: there are only individual believers who face persecution for studying Nursi's books.

As of August 2020, Kim was still in the CWSC. Uzbekistan does not accept him, since he has never been a citizen of this state. He does not fall under the criteria of the program for the resettlement of ethnic Koreans in the Republic of Korea. Kim is ready to receive friends from Ukraine and Turkey, but he does not have any documents, he is not issued a certificate of a stateless person. In December 2019, Valentina Kazakova, head of the Main Department of Internal Affairs of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, said that Kim should be granted a temporary residence permit, but this never happened. In the meantime, the bailiffs' service issued a decision to terminate the enforcement of the expulsion judgment due to the impossibility of expulsion.

A new complaint in the interests of Kim was filed with the Zheleznodorozhny District Court of Khabarovsk by lawyers from the Institute of Law and Public Policy.

Sources

• Victoria Arnold. RUSSIA: Imprisonment completed, citizenship stripped, awaiting deportation // Forum 18. 2019. 22 May.
• Case card No. 5-424/2019 // Website of the Zheleznodorozhny District Court of Khabarovsk. April 15, 2019
• Case card No. 12-168/2019 // Website of the Khabarovsk Regional Court. April 30, 2019
• A Muslim political prisoner was deprived of citizenship and is being held in a temporary detention center. HRC "Memorial" message. May 29, 2020
• “This is tantamount to torture”: today we filed an application in the case of long-term imprisonment of a stateless person // Institute of Law and Public Policy at Facebook. 2020. August 20.