require the trial judge to set any time limit when ordering detention of foreigners; as a result, and according to customary judicial practice, the time spent in detention became equal to the expiry of the statute of limitation for a particular immigration offence. That translated to Mr Mskhiladze – or any other foreign national, asylum seeker or a stateless person – being kept in detention for a minimum of two years or potentially indefinitely. The second structural problem was revealed by the unsuccessful petition of the Federal Bailiffs Service to terminate the enforcement proceedings against Mr Mskhiladze (Article 31.7 CAO). As a result, Mr Mskhiladze was kept in detention without the opportunity to have the length and legality of his detention judicially reviewed. In its landmark Mskhiladze decision from May 2017, the RCC found the above elements of Russian law (Arts. 31.7 and 31.9 CAO) unconstitutional to the extent those: did not allow to resolve in court the question of the lawfulness of continued detention of stateless persons sentenced to administrative removal and placed in detention centres, (…) in circumstances (…) where there was no actual possibility of enforcing the removal (Decision of RCC, 23 May 2017, No. 14-P, p. 26, my emphasis, thereafter ‘RCC Decision’). The Constitutional Court defined the detention of stateless persons as deprivation of liberty not only with regard to Article 22 of the Russian Constitution, but also Article 5 ECHR, and the ECtHR jurisprudence. The RCC judges noted that deprivation of liberty ‘can acquire a variety of forms that are not always identical to imprisonment in its classical sense’ (RCC Decision, p. 12). The RCC further affirmed that: any deprivation of liberty must meet the [European] Convention's criteria for protecting the individual from arbitrariness of the authorities, and the base of its 11