On March 22, the International Renaissance Foundation, the Human Rights and Justice Program Initiative, gathered experts to discuss violations of human rights in the occupied Crimea relating to Russia’s campaign to impose Russian citizenship. During the meeting, the study “Human Rights in the Context of Imposing Russian Citizenship in Crimea” was presented by experts from the Open Society Law Initiative. The full text of the study can be downloaded here.
“In the world history of the last decades it is very hard to find such gross violations of human rights as the ones, which we observed in Crimea, during the unconsented imposition of Russian nationality to Crimeans. It is more common to find human rights violations in cases of citizenship deprivation, however, in Crimea the opposite situation has occurred. You may be wondering what negative consequences of involuntary imposition of citizenship can one find? We have investigated this issue and discovered a lot of discriminatory practices in this field”,- said Olexandr Sushko, Executive Director of the International Renaissance Foundation.
Laura Bingham from the Open Society Justice Initiative explained that both international and Ukrainian human rights standards contain no comprehensive procedure for evaluation of actions taken by countries to recognize ethnic groups and to provide naturalization to them. “It was exactly what we saw in Crimea”, she said.
