22 ALPEYEVA AND DZHALAGONIYA v. RUSSIA JUDGMENT out by the FMS in 2010; (ii) no relevant entries indicating that Russian citizenship had been granted to the applicant had been found in the databases. 122. The Court notes that the report of 26 January 2006 on a check carried out by the agencies of the interior (see paragraph 12 above) concluded that in 2002 a Russian passport had been issued to the first applicant in an irregular manner. Likewise, the FMS report of 30 June 2010 and the FMS decision of 27 September 2010 (see paragraphs 39 and 45 above) concluded that in 2001 a Russian passport had been irregularly issued to the second applicant. However, none of the reports established that this was the applicants’ fault. On the contrary, the report of 30 June 2010 alleged negligence on the part of the competent State authorities. 123. The Court observes that defining the conditions and procedures for granting citizenship and overseeing compliance with those conditions is within the State’s exclusive competence. In this respect, the Court refers to the Ombudsman’s “Special Report on the practice of seizing Russian passports from former citizens of the USSR who had moved to the Russian Federation from CIS countries”, issued on 6 December 2007. The Ombudsman criticised the practice in question, as a result of which several thousand Russian passports had been seized on the grounds that they had been “erroneously issued”, despite no fault having been detected on the part of the passport holders. In the Ombudsman’s view, any irregularities related to the issue of the passports were due to negligence on the part of the staff of the competent State agencies and the fact that they were not appropriately qualified (see paragraph 74 above). In his Annual Report for 2011, the Ombudsman again addressed the ongoing practice. He stated, in particular, that at the time when former Soviet nationals who had found themselves in CIS countries had applied for Russian citizenship through Russian consulate agencies, the fact that they had done so might not have been registered in the corresponding databases, and in addition there was no single database (see paragraph 81 above). In the Ombudsman’s Annual Report for 2012 it was stated that the overall number of Russian passports deemed to be invalid had reached 80,000, with approximately 8,000 being declared invalid each year (see paragraph 83 above). 124. Having regard to the foregoing, the Court concludes that the applicants’ identity documents confirming their Russian citizenship might have been irregularly issued in 1994 and 2001 with respect to the first applicant and in 1998 and 2002 with respect to the second applicant. However, this was not through any fault of their own, but due to the lack of streamlined procedures and a unified database, and also because of errors committed by State officials. 125. Therefore, owing to the authorities’ mishandling of procedures related to the granting of citizenship, the first applicant, having had her passport seized in 2006, and the second applicant, having been denied a