According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, there are currently an estimated 12 million stateless people in the world. The number of such people in Russia is estimated to be about 178,000. The collapse of the Soviet Union has led to an increase in the number of stateless persons, especially among those who belonged to national minorities: there were people that the emerging post-Soviet governments considered to be belonging to citizenship of other countries, even if they had lived on certain territories for many years. A large number of stateless persons are those of Roma origin.
The state must protect everyone, including persons without citizenship, against violations of human rights. Detention of stateless persons in detention centers for foreign nationals with the aim of further deportation from the country for violating the rules of stay in Russian Federation can not be considered legitimate as deportation is not feasible in such cases.
Imprisoning stateless persons for the purpose of deportation is a cruel and senseless practice widely used by Russian courts and law enforcement agencies. Being only a “provisional measure” for expulsion, such deprivation of liberty turns into a punishment. In 2013,…
Three prisoners of the Center for the Temporary Detention of Foreign Nationals (CTDFN) in Tolyatti have been on a hunger strike since May 6, Radio Liberty reports. These are former prisoners of the Russian penitentiary system who were placed in…
Native of Kyrgyzstan Andrei B. has been held in a foreign national detention center twice – his is one of the many cases of stateless people being repeatedly deemed “violators of migration laws” and deprived of liberty for extended periods, even…
This joint statement is an urgent call to States, UN agencies, donors and other stakeholders to learn lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic and take sustained action to correct past mistakes and prioritise protecting stateless people’s rights and the right to…
Оn June 17, 2021, the COVID-19 Emergency Statelessness Fund (CESF) Consortium – an initiative of the Institute for Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) – published a report on the impact of COVID-19 on stateless people around the world. It is noted…
At the end of June 2020, Anti-Discrimination Centre “Memorial” in cooperation with lawyer Olga Tseytlina managed to secure the release of two more stateless persons (natives of Kyrgyzstan) from temporary detention centre for foreign nationals. Both of these stateless persons…
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