Article 322 of the RF Criminal Code. At the same time, failure to enforce this decision
means that the stateless person will be prosecuted a second time, issued another
deportation ruling, and confined in a foreign national detention center.
In 2014, Ilgar Alimuradov was arrested in Saint Petersburg, found guilty
of violating residence rules, and confined in a foreign national detention
center in Saint Petersburg, where he spent six months in very difficult
conditions: the cells where he was held were overcrowded, and he was
only allowed to exercise once a week for a total of 15 minutes. Bailiffs
could not execute the deportation ruling because the court did not duly
establish his identity or citizenship, did not determine if it would be possible
to deport him, and did not take account for the fact that Azerbaijan’s
consulate could not confirm his citizenship. It was only through the efforts
of attorneys and human rights defenders that the court’s illegal decision
was appealed and Alimuradov was released. However, execution of
the expulsion ruling was not stopped but replaced with independent
controlled departure, which also could not be executed. Two months
after his release, Alimuradov was arrested again, this time for failing
to execute the expulsion ruling. He was preparing to be confined in the
detention center again, but the court refused to prosecute him, thus ending
proceedings in his case. Later, in January 2019, the European Court of
Human Rights issued a judgment in Alimuradov’s case finding violation of
a number of the Convention’s articles: Article 3 (prohibition of torture and
inhuman or degrading treatment), Clause 1 of Article 5 (right to liberty
and security of person), Clause 4 of Article 5 (right to speedy court review
of the lawfulness of detention).
Judges are being held hostage to the absence of norms that account for the situation of stateless persons and are forced to issue expulsion rulings because they have
no other mechanism for resolving the illegal residence of stateless persons in Russia.
This is particularly true for courts in Moscow, Moscow Oblast, Saint Petersburg, and
Leningrad Oblast, because violation of residence rules in these areas entails mandatory expulsion. Courts in other regions of Russia do issue expulsion rulings, but they
can also order a fine without deportation.
In 2013, after years of work in Russian courts on the cases of stateless persons
deprived of their liberty in a foreign national temporary detention center, ADC Memorial lodged a complaint with the ECtHR. The applicant in this case was Roman
Anatolyevich Kim—a stateless person and ethnic Korean born in Uzbekistan in 1962
and living in Russia since 1990, where he previously served time in prison. Upon
his release, Kim found himself “illegal,” like many others who had not completed
paperwork for documents prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and then spent
an extended period in prison.
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