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In recent years, after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has significantly tightened its legislation on migration and citizenship, and some innovations create an immediate risk of statelessness. The long-standing problem of statelessness is rooted in the events of the collapse of the USSR, related border changes, and the emerging sovereignty of post-Soviet countries.
In April 2023, a new version of the Law on Citizenship of the Russian Federation was adopted. According to authoritative experts, the consequences of the law in its current form will be ambiguous: some groups of stateless people have retained or received preferences in access to Russian citizenship, while others have lost their existing advantages, and the logic of legislators is unclear. The most vulnerable stateless people are citizens of the former USSR without valid documents, whose problems were addressed in a separate chapter in the old version of the law.
The new version, however, deprives them of their former benefits in law and in practice (the “simplified procedure” for obtaining citizenship); now they can only follow the long and thorny path of the “general procedure” for applying for citizenship. Elena Burtina, expert of the Civil Assistance Committee, concludes that “the bulk of stateless citizens of the former USSR are de facto deprived of the prospects of obtaining citizenship.”
Innovations related to the deprivation of acquired citizenship have negative consequences. Article 22 of the Law on Citizenship in the 2017 version, “Grounds for the cancellation of decisions on citizenship of the Russian Federation”, has already caused human rights defenders to sound the alarm. It states that acquired citizenship can be revoked if the applicant has provided false information / forged documents (Part 1 of Article 22); or for a conviction for crimes related to “terrorist” and “extremist” matters (Part 2 of Article 22).
In 2021, the legitimacy of Part 2 of Article 22 was unfortunately confirmed by the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation. The aforementioned new version of the Law on Citizenship of the Russian Federation (April 2023) significantly expands the grounds for deprivation of citizenship under Chapter 4, which include “the communication of deliberately false information […] expressed in the commission of a crime (preparation for a crime or attempted crime)”, “committing actions that pose a threat to the national security of the Russian Federation”, and “failure to fulfill the obligation to initially register for military service”.
In the first six months of the new version of the Law on Citizenship of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia terminated the acquired Russian citizenship of 398 people because of the crimes they committed. In the period from January to July 2024, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia deprived about 1000 people of citizenship for the same reason.