respect of whom the administrative removal from the Russian Federation cannot be executed due to (…) the absence of a state willing to accept such a person’ (RCC Decision p. 27). This position of the Russian Constitutional Court was further strengthened by the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the case Mskhiladze v Russia delivered six months later (application no. 47741/16, judgment of 13 February 2018).8 The ECtHR ruled that the prolonged detention of Mr Mskhiladze, especially in the context of his statelessness amounted to the violation of Articles 5(1) and 5(4) ECHR – right to liberty and security. The Strasbourg Court awarded Mr Mskhiladze 7,500 EUR of compensation. Legal productivity of statelessness In the immediate aftermath of the RCC ruling, Mr Mskhiladze was released from detention and his case put for fresh consideration before the domestic courts. However, as I argue in this paper, the consequences of the Constitutional and Strasbourg court rulings go well beyond this individual case. This RCC decision effectively stipulated that, if deportation or administrative removal is not effected within three months, then the point of future detention is questionable also from a human rights perspective, and should therefore be reviewed before domestic courts. The subsequent developments reveal how the protections affirmed explicitly with regard to de jure stateless persons can extend to de facto stateless, who may be nationals of a particular country but whose nationality is ultimately ineffective. Why was the case of de jure stateless Mr Mskhiladze a good test case to fight? The Russian justice system generally does not inspire much confidence. There are many scholarly 8 The legal representatives of Mr Mskhiladze applied to ECtHR in parallel to launching a case with the RCC. Filing an application to Strasburg upon the exhaustion of domestic remedies is the final resort in many immigration and refugee law cases in Russia (Kubal 2019). 13