80,000 such passports). Paradoxically, these passports confirmed the owner’s identity, but not his or her RF citizenship. 14 19. Those stateless persons who entered Russia before 1 November 2002, or received a “wrong” passport before 1 July 2002, have the theoretical opportunity to join the procedure of legalisation and are even granted “preferential conditions” (by law, they have the right to bypass the temporary and permanent residence stages and apply for citizenship right away). The law also acknowledges that stateless persons in these categories may not have an identity document, and the procedure for establishing identity is mentioned. At the same time, administrative prosecution of any stateless person applying for citizenship is prohibited, even if that person has violated “immigration rules.”15 20. In reality, though, stateless persons lacking identity documents encounter difficulties: migration authorities either do not conduct the procedure for establishing identity (and prosecute the applicant for an immigration offence), or prolong this procedure for an indeterminate period. The procedure for establishing the identity of a stateless person is also flawed because it does not envisage a specific identity document for stateless persons; the practice is to issue a temporary identity document for an RF citizen, on which the words ‘RF citizen’ are crossed out. The validity of this document is established arbitrarily (from one to six months), and stateless persons who request that the validity period be increased are rejected. 16 The burden of proof lies with the stateless person, who often cannot prove that they don’t have citizenship of another country (the officials of respective countries don’t respond to requests). Furthermore, stateless applicants are frequently rejected by migration authorities on the basis that they do not have documents confirming their arrival and residence in the RF. 21. The “preferential” procedure is not envisaged for former Soviet citizens who arrived in Russia after 1 November 2002 or who received an RF passport, later determined to be illegal, after 1 July 2002. They are subject to a general three stage procedure for naturalisation: 1. application for a temporary residence permit; 2. application for permanent residence after one year of temporary residence and upon confirmation of a legal source of income and place of stay; and 3. application for citizenship after five years of permanent residence without leaving Russia (under the general procedure), or immediately after receiving the permanent residence (under the expedited procedure). In other words, despite their long-term residence in Russia, they must apply for citizenship in the same way a migrant would. This means in practice that such people find themselves outside of any legalisation procedure: they cannot even start the legalisation procedure and are rejected during the very first stage when they try to submit documents for temporary residence. Among the required mandatory documents that usually cannot be provided by stateless persons are: a valid identity document and former or current citizenship (a Soviet passport is not recognised as valid in practice); proof of a legal source of income (it is impossible to work, to be registered at the place of living or buy a property officially without valid personal documents); and proof of legality of stay in the RF (valid documents on crossing the border – migration cards introduced in November 2002). In other words, this procedure is mainly intended for “new” migrants and not for stateless people who have lived in Russia for decades. 14 Chapter VIII.1 of the law “On RF Citizenship” cancelled out the negative consequence of the Federal Migration Service (FMS) mistakes for the holders of these passports and opened the path to legalisation for these people (some sources even refer to this additional Chapter as “passport amnesty”). The history of protecting the rights of holders of “illegal” passports is set forth in greater detail in the Report of the RF Human Rights Ombudsman V.P. Lukin for 2012 http://rg.ru/2013/03/29/lukin-dok.html, as well as in his earlier special report “On the Practice of Confiscating Russian Passports from Former Soviet Citizens who Moved to the Russian Federation from CIS Countries” (2007) http://rg.ru/2008/01/26/pasporta-doklad.html (both reports in Russian). 15 Article 41.1.5 of Chapter VIII.1 16 This information was received from attorneys working on the cases of stateless persons. ADC Memorial archives 5