Law or policy reform enabling automatic acquisition of nationality
Statelessness in the Kyrgyz Republic
As in other States formed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, statelessness
in Kyrgyzstan has persisted for more than three decades. The causes are migration
between the former Soviet republics, particularly within Central Asia, problems with
modernizing and simplifying the rules and facilities for providing legal residence and
identity documentation, and differences in nationality laws among the countries in
the region. Nationality problems were further exacerbated by territorial disputes, as
a number of successor states failed to agree on the demarcation of frontiers. Political
calculations and national security concerns brought further complexity into nationality
issues that required international cooperation. The biggest groups of stateless persons
in Kyrgyzstan comprised persons holding former USSR passports, undocumented
persons living in border areas and foreign spouses married to Kyrgyz nationals.
Since the adoption of the 2007 Law on Citizenship, the Kyrgyz Republic has been taking
active steps to tackle the roots of statelessness in the country through joint efforts of
the Government, civil society and international organizations. This cooperation has been
in the form of a number of joint initiatives such as surveys, gaps analysis studies, and
finally – field operations to provide assistance to individual applicants.
In the early 1990s, Kyrgyzstan was one of the primary destinations for refugees from
Tajikistan. These refugees became stateless because they left Tajikistan before the
country adopted its first nationality law. The facilitated naturalization of around 10,000
of these refugees between 2004 and 2007 was thus a major achievement in ensuring
durable solutions for refugees through local integration, as well as in the resolution of a
protracted statelessness situation.
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