CITIZENSHIP LAW OF LATVIA



RECENTLY ADOPTED CITIZENSHIP LAW OF THE REPUBLIC OF LATVIA:
NOTES ON ITS NATURE AND PERSPECTIVES OF IMPLEMENTATION

The adoption of the Citizenship Law demanded more than four years of
the Latvian legislature's time. In the process of long-time debates,
the draft law was becoming more and more restrictive in nature.

Despite the authorities of Latvia frequently declare that
recommendations of the CoE experts and CSCE High Commissioner on
National Minorities have been taken into account, most of
recommendations in fact have been ignored. The comparison of the text
of the Law with the recommendations mentioned above obviously reveals
this. Just the opposite, a series of provisions of the Law have been
even tightened in comparison with previous versions criticized by
the experts for overdoing in restrictiveness.

The following features of the Law should be pointed out (most of
them were contested in the CoE and CSCE recommendations, but at best
remained unchanged):

1) The Law envisages favours in naturalization given under the
ethnic criteria, for ethnic Latvians and Livs (Art.13 (1) 1), which
overtly contradicts the demands of the International Convention on
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Art.5 d) iii),
which Latvia has also acceded to.

2) According to the adopted Law, the children of stateless permanent
residents of Latvia who should be born in Latvia even after the Law
taking effect, remain stateless too, thereby increasing the number
of stateless persons - this thwarts the spirit and the letter of the
Art.7 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, also ratified by
Latvia.

3) Though a certain priority in naturalization is envisaged for
persons born in Latvia, nevertheless, requirements for naturalization
stipulated by corresponding provisions of the Law considerably exceed
ones permitted for those persons who otherwise would be stateless by
the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which Latvia is
also state party of (eg, the Law allows refusal in naturalization,
etc.). Thus, the Law obviously contradicts this Convention as well.

4) So-called "Russian Latvians" (i.e. persons who had the right to
Latvia citizenship corresponding to the 1919 Law on Citizenship and
their descendants), according to the present Law, can obtain
citizenship through naturalization, though on favourable conditions.
At the same time, long ago on October 28, 1992 the LR Supreme Council
Resolution confirmed the belonging of these people to the entity of
the LR citizens. The execution of this resolution was openly sabotaged
by the Department on Citizenship and Immigration bureaucrats, and now
the parliament has approved the bureaucrats' unlawful actions instead
of having them execute the Resolution - thus actually depriving tens
of thousands of people of the LR citizenship.

5) According to the Law, an applicant for citizenship can be refused
even if he meets all requirements and criteria for naturalization
(the "permissive" character of the Law). The opportunity to appeal to
the court does not repair this because the court would face the full
compliance of the supposed refusal with the provisions of the Law,
and will have no right to demand the review of the refusal.

6) The required term of residence is counted "forward" - i.e., from
the point of view of the Law, there is no difference between the
individual who arrived in Latvia just before the adoption of the
Declaration of Independence, and the one who has been living in
Latvia for decades. Besides, the Law does not distinguish between
stateless persons and applicants who have any other state's
citizenship, therefore, the Law is not oriented to the elimination of
large-scale statelessness in Latvia.

7) The requirement of having a legal source of income (Art.12 (1) 5)
is very vague and can be interpreted in quite different ways.

8) Art.11 (1) 8) provides that those persons who after January 13,
1991, have acted against the Republic of Latvia does not require
court sentence to detect that the person really did this, so, this
provision creates good room for arbitrary refusals in naturalization.

9) Elderly persons are not exempted from any of numerous tests and
examinations, what makes naturalization practically unavailable for
most of them.

10) When implementing the regulation concerning the language
proficiency check, the results of ca.200,000 individuals who have
already passed the language certification in Latvia are in no way
taken into account. In fact, they will have to retake the examination,
which entails a big deal of expenses and inevitably drags out the
process of naturalization.

11) The Law itself does not determine a series of issues which are,
in nature, of crucial importance for implementation of naturalization
process: concrete regulations and procedures for conducting language
tests, examinations on history of Latvia, Constitution and
Constitutional law, anthem etc., corresponding bodies responsible
for carrying out these procedures, their authorities, possibilities
of appeal etc. Latvia has already faced the regretful experience of
gross bureaucratic violations, registered also by court decisions, and,
despite all, the adopted Law, instead of creating protective schemes
against arbitrariness, encourages even wider possibilities for this.
This surely creates all necessary conditions for bureaucratic
arbitrariness and corruption.

For example, regardless of cancellation of the quota principle at
the level of the Law, the idea of "technical quotas" becomes more
and more popular, i.e. quotas introduced "off the record" and based
upon "expected capacities" of the bodies which are to process
applications. Though the provision of the restriction of the period
for considering application to one year has been introduced, the
delay of the very possibility to submit application is to be
expected - eg, through bureaucratic system of queues, similarly to
ones which took place during the process of residents' registration.

All mentioned and several other provisions of the Law clearly indicate
that the Law is not intended to give the possibility to integrated
non-citizens to obtain the LR citizenship in reasonable time, nor
will it facilitate the resolution of the problem of mass
statelessness in Latvia. The destinies of the today's non-citizens,
in the ranks of the Law, are defined not by their virtual contribution,
convictions or actual integration level in Latvia, but exclusively by
the officials who are free to take whatever decisions.

After the adoption of the Citizenship Law it became clear that there
is no hope of more or less soon solution of the statelessness problem
in Latvia and that for a very long time there will be existing many
hundreds of thousands of stateless people.

Boris Tsilevich,
co-Chairman
Latvia League of Stateless Persons

Fax:     371-2-370049
E-mail:  boris@eawarn.riga.lv