ALPEYEVA AND DZHALAGONIYA v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT 11 Russian passports and applied to exchange them. Their old passports were seized and the issue of new ones was refused on the grounds that the previous passports had been issued to them “in error” through no fault of their own. Thousands of people were affected by this practice, and in most cases there were no judicial decisions. Many regional ombudsmen also issued special reports on the practice of seizing passports. 74. The Ombudsman pointed out that for several years following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there had been neither a streamlined procedure in Russia on the acquisition or recognition of Russian citizenship nor a standard document evidencing such citizenship. In such circumstances, between 1997 and 2007 Russian passports had been issued to 162.4 million people. Over 126 million passports had been issued before 2004. When people born in other republics of the former Soviet Union obtained Russian passports, they simultaneously acquired the rights and obligations of Russian citizenship: they voted, paid taxes, received education, served in the army, and obtained other documents, including the international passport required for travelling abroad. As in all cases, the issue of a passport followed a check on whether the person was a Russian citizen; all holders of a Russian passport were supposed to have undergone such a check at least once. Those who subsequently applied for an international passport or to exchange their Russian passport had to have successfully undergone the check a number of times. Hence, there could be no fault or bad faith on the part of those persons, by virtue of the fact that they had been granted Russian passports. And yet, several thousand Russian passports had been seized on the grounds that they had been “erroneously issued”, whereas, according to the Ombudsman, breaches of the procedure for issuing passports, if any, were due to the negligence of the staff of the competent State agencies and the fact that they were not appropriately qualified, or even due to crimes committed by them for pecuniary gain. 75. The Ombudsman further referred to a claim submitted by the Saratov Region prosecutor’s office to the Fedorovskiy District Court, whereby the prosecutor’s office had sought to have declared unlawful the local FSM branch’s practice of seizing Russian passports on the grounds of “doubts that they had been lawfully issued to persons born outside the Russian Federation”. According to the prosecutor’s office, since a Russian passport attested to Russian citizenship, it might only be seized where citizenship was revoked on the basis of a court decision establishing that the person in question had submitted false information or documents in order to acquire it. However, the Fedorovskiy District Court had dismissed the application, having found that issues concerning citizenship were in the sole competence of the President and his competent executive agencies. The Ombudsman pointed out in this respect that the courts were not precluded from establishing facts which had served as the basis for a decision to issue a passport.