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Hello Community,

I have a question concerning a client of mine (I am working as a psychologist). This client is currently stateless, although he has no official confirmation of being stateless. He came to Germany about 30 years ago from Aserbaidzhan - with a passport from the Soviet Union, birthplace Aserbaidzhan. Since his last passport expired he doesn’t have a valid passport - German authorities don’t want to confirm the statelessness. They want him to get official confirmations from russian and armentian consulate to prove that he is neither russian nor armenian citizen. He has a official document from Aserbaidzahn confirming that he has no aserbaidzhanian citizenship. All he wants is the official title of statelessness so that he is able to apply for German citizienship. He lives in the current situation (no valid documents) for 4 years now - which means he can’t work nor leave the country. Two lawyers who were involved in the case couldn’t help. The problem is the German foreigners office handling the case - requesting a negative confirmation of citizenship from the Russian Federation and Armenia seems rather arbitrary - as my client has no connection to those two countries - he wasn’t born there, didn’t live there nor one of his family members. The only connection is that the client was a citizen of the Soviet Union - but the SU didn’t consist of three countries only?! Getting those negative confirmations is quite complicated as they require not only valid documents but also quite a lot of money. 

 

Does anybody know a similar case with citizens of former Soviet Union? Thanks for your help!

Hi @Rebek_ka , Thanks for sharing and glad to see that you found our forum! It’s extremely frustrating to read and hear - again and again - that the main issue in solving statelessness remains in the lacking knowledge/capacity of the local authorities to recognise the statelessness of a person. Your client is definitely not the only one who is facing this issue - mainly, as we don’t have a standardised procedure for this in Germany. May I ask which city your client is based in ? (Feel free to respond to this question in a direct messag) We have been able to establish connections to authorities or supporting institutions in a few German cities, this might be helpful… Also, as most of the cases need very individual approaches I would suggest we schedule a video call to discuss the situation and find out whether there are helpful contacts we could connect you to? Feel free to send me a direct message 🙂 Looking forward to hearing from you. All the best, Christiana 

Hello @Rebek_ka, I may also be able to lend a hand, as I have connections to legal specialists in Ukraine that are experiences in dealing with these kind of cases. They may provide some useful information on the specific issue of having a Soviet passport and authorities assuming a nationality for the stateless person. We see it happen a lot. It is not in line with good practices. To be honest, in this case, by what you described, the assumptions made by the Germany authorities do not make any sense. Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia were different Soviet republics, and became different countries upon the fall of the USSR. It’s like asking a stateless person with Vietnamese origin to prove lacking Chinese and Japanese nationality. It seems quite arbitrary. Please email me and we can discuss further: aleksejs.ivashuk@gmail.com

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