{"id":22816,"date":"2021-04-08T11:46:52","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T08:46:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/news\/roma-i-problema-bezgrazhdanstva\/"},"modified":"2021-11-12T17:29:35","modified_gmt":"2021-11-12T14:29:35","slug":"roma-statelessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adcmemorial.org\/en\/articles\/roma-statelessness\/","title":{"rendered":"Roma and the Problem of Statelessness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

April 8 is International Roma Day. This year we want to draw attention to the problems of statelessness and personal documents, which remain pressing for the Roma population. We are publishing several typical stories about the plight of stateless Roma people \u2013 our contemporaries living without citizenship, passports, or rights in the digital age, which requires authorization and identification at every step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Roma people have been living in Europe for several centuries and have not practiced a nomadic lifestyle for a long time, but they make up a significant part of the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who are stateless. The lack of documents and citizenship is often the departure point for the vicious circle of structural discrimination that the Roma constantly face: It is nearly impossible to get an education, official employment, social benefits, or health insurance without being a citizen. While stateless people are invisible to the legal and social welfare systems, they are not to repressive bodies, which have no problem finding them in violation of migration rules and sending them to detention centers for migrants pending deportation. But there is nowhere to deport them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Roma minority is at particular risk for statelessness because they move frequently, they often have a careless attitude towards documents, and they do not have enough education to understand bureaucratic procedures. Given that the state does not acknowledge its positive obligation to document the population, the situation of Roma people is exacerbated by racial bias and discriminatory treatment on the part of migration workers, registration bodies, passport offices, and other state agencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our region, the problems of statelessness caused by the dissolution of the Soviet Union have still not been overcome. The independence of former Soviet states, the appearance of new borders and passport control, and the need to turn in old Soviet passports and acquire new citizenship have posed a series of problems for the civil status of people who were born, got married, and had children in republics that differ from the ones they were in when the Soviet Union broke up. The economic hardships of the 1990s forced many Roma to move again and caused new problems with documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anna and Aladar<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ten years ago, in 2011, Russia paid millions of rubles in compensation to stateless people Anna L. and Aladar F. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) reviewed their application as a matter of priority.<\/a> That was when Russia first acknowledged that stateless people are held in inhuman conditions without any periodic judicial monitoring of their situation or any possibility of deportation, resulting from their lack of citizenship or documents. Over these years, neither Russia, where Anna and Aladar are living, or Ukraine, where they were born, has taken any measures to document them. They found themselves hostage to unresolved systemic problems in Russian and Ukrainian laws, the military conflict between the two countries, a tightening of the border, and the long-standing problems of the Roma minority typical of former Soviet countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n