9. Such measures should include amending laws to eliminate violations of the rights of people held in CTDFNs (ensuring oversight of terms and the legitimacy of placement in a CTDFN, improving detention conditions) and to prevent stateless persons from ending up in these facilities (creating an effective procedure for providing legal status to stateless persons, including persons who have not been able to acquire legal status over the course of decades). 10. Russia’s implementation of the measures prescribed in the ECtHR judgment could bring significant improvement to the lives not just of stateless persons like Roman Kim, but also of foreign nationals in CTDFNs, since they also suffer from extended detention in inhuman conditions and cannot challenge this violation of their rights on their own or with the help of professional attorneys due to deprivation of any connection with the outside world. 11. However, the Russian Government has unfortunately not yet adopted any of these measures to implement the ECtHR judgment in relation to stateless persons and other detainees in CTDFNs. Statelessness in Russia 12. It is always challenging to have comprehensive statistics on statelessness – due to the hidden nature of the problem. However, it is evident that Russia has an extremely large stateless population. According to the 2010 census, over 178,000 people8 identified themselves as being stateless. The 2017 UNHCR Global Trends Report estimated the stateless population in Russia at the end of 2016 to be 90,771.9 However, it is likely that the actual number of stateless persons in Russia is greater than this. 13. The main cause of statelessness in contemporary Russia is the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Even though locally-registered residents are usually granted citizenship in the successor states, many former Soviet citizens did not “automatically” exchange their Soviet passports for new ones and become citizens of their new states. In fact, invalid Soviet passports are still the only document that thousands of people have. 14. RF citizenship laws, like citizenship laws in other former Soviet countries, have been amended many times. Law No. 1948-I “On RF Citizenship” of 28 November 1991 envisaged an expedited registration procedure requiring only a petition for former Soviet citizens to obtain RF citizenship, and set a timeframe for registering citizenship (a three-year period, which was later extended to 31 December 2000). In 2002 Federal Law No. 62-FZ “On Citizenship of the Russian Federation” entered into force. This law basically equated stateless persons who were former Soviet citizens with “regular” foreigners; the only concessions they received under the so-called expedited naturalisation procedure was a shorter residence period. Meanwhile the overall three-step process for becoming a citizen remained the same as the “general procedure.” Finally, in 2012 Chapter VIII.1 was added to this law. This chapter was designed to regulate, over the next five years (till January 1, 2017), the situation of stateless persons, who have long been unable to acquire legal status. In 2016, as the problem of regularisation of such people was not fully solved, the formal opportunity to obtain Russian citizenship for “irregular” former citizens of the USSR was prolonged until January 1, 2020. According to official statistics, between 2012 and November 2016, more than 45 000 people (of an estimated 70,000) benefitted from this change. (from more than 70 000 whom it concerned). 10 8 The All-Russia Census. 2010. Volume 4. Ethnic structure, language competence, citizenship. (In Russian) http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm 9 UNHCR. Global Trends. Forced Displacement in 2016, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/5943e8a34.pdf. See Annex 7 for the statelessness figures by country. 10 Legislation initiative ��On prolongation of the time of action of Chapter VIII.1 of the Federal Law “On citizenship of the Russian Federation”. Submitted by the State Duma Deputy Konstantin Zatulin on 2.11.2016. Came into force 19.12.2016. Website of K.Zatulin: https://zatulin.ru/prodlenie-sroka-dejstviya-glavy-viii-1-federalnogo-zakona-o-grazhdanstve-rossijskoj-federacii.html 3