Tasheva told what Ukraine will do with the occupation documents after the liberation of Crimea
One of the primary steps after the deoccupation of Crimea is the verification, restoration and issuance of Ukrainian state documents, as well as review of court decisions.
This was reported by the Permanent Representative of the President in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea Tamil Tasheva in the column for “Ukrainian Pravda” “What Ukraine will do with the occupation documents after the liberation of the Crimean Peninsula”.
Tasheva noted that after the occupation of Crimea, the Russian Federation began to forcibly issue Russian passports to our citizens. In case of refusal from the occupying country, the rights of Ukrainian citizens to medical protection, social and pension assistance, official employment documents were limited by the occupying forces.
Residents of the occupied Crimea were forced to obtain occupation passports so that they would not be kicked out of their homes, their businesses would not be taken away, etc. One of the first priority steps after de-occupation is the verification, restoration and issuance of Ukrainian state documents, as well as review of court decisions, she wrote.
Tasheva recalled that in 2014, the occupying administrations automatically equated residents of occupied Crimea with citizens of the Russian Federation, even those who were not on the peninsula. This is not a new practice for Russia. Forced passporting is also constantly increasing in other occupied territories of Georgia and Moldova.
Firstly, this is one of the barbaric ways of “appropriating” the territory together with the population. Secondly, it is interference in the internal affairs of the country and its citizens. And, as you know, this is one of the elements of the colonial policy of the Russian Federation. According to international law, such actions of the aggressor country are qualified as a war crime, – emphasized the Representative of the President in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea.
She noted that the Russian authorities use the fact of “automatic citizenship” to prosecute pro-Ukrainian activists. The most famous examples were cases Oleg Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko who, despite their non-receipt of Russian occupation passports, were detained and illegally deported to the territory of the Russian Federation on suspicion of not having committed criminal offenses. Both are citizens of Ukraine and lived in Crimea at the time of the occupation.
“Automatic citizenship”, even if a person acquired it against his will, made it possible for the occupation and Russian courts to consider the criminal cases of Sentsov and Kolchenko not as citizens of Ukraine, but as citizens of Russia themselves, not agreeing to the release of such persons through exchange in the future”, Tasheva emphasized. .
According to Part 4 of Art. 5 of the Law of Ukraine “On ensuring the rights and freedoms of citizens and the legal regime in the temporarily occupied territory”, forced automatic acquisition of citizenship of the Russian Federation by citizens of Ukraine living in the occupied territory is not recognized by Ukraine and is not a basis for accepting Ukrainian citizenship.
Tasheva stated that Ukraine does not recognize the worthless occupation passports that the Russian Federation forcibly distributed to the residents of Crimea – all of them were and remain citizens of Ukraine.
The representative office of the President of Ukraine in the AR of Crimea is actively working on the development of all the main mechanisms to eliminate the consequences of the temporary occupation on the peninsula. Verification of documents and their replacement with Ukrainian ones is one of several aspects, but it allows citizens of Ukraine, who were forcibly given Russian passports, to fully participate in the life of their country, Tasheva emphasized.
There have already been such precedents in international experience. After the de-occupation of their territories in 1995, the Croats also verified the documents of their citizens, which they received during the occupation, and replaced them with Croatian ones.
Currently, the Ukrainian legislation has a procedure for the verification and restoration of Ukrainian documents, if they were introduced or supported for the first time, but it is quite complicated.
We will work to simplify it as much as possible for the inhabitants of the peninsula, who had to live under the conditions of occupation. It should be understood that life continued in the occupied territories all this time: Ukrainian citizens were born, married, divorced and died, and the state cannot deny this, she added.
In Ukrainian legislation, there is a procedure for obtaining Ukrainian-style death or birth certificates, but in addition to passports, due to the spread of occupation jurisdiction on the peninsula, citizens of Ukraine in occupied Crimea received other occupation documents. Consideration of such documents by state bodies does not mean automatic recognition of occupation administrations as valid.
The Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories, and the Representation of the President of Ukraine in the AR of Crimea are already working on the legislative consolidation of the procedure for obtaining birth and death documents. But this is only a small part of the documents that will need to be verified.
The framework of the transition period, during which the defined list of documents is verified and replaced with state-style documents, was also discussed. When establishing this period, the Ukrainian state must provide an opportunity for authorities (their subdivisions operating in the de-occupied territory), military-civilian administration and judicial authorities to organize and carry out additional actions for the verification of primary documents.
Of course, there are documents that Ukraine does not recognize and will not recognize. These are, for example, the adoption of children by citizens of the Russian Federation who have nothing to do with Ukrainian citizenship, and the so-called “nationalization” of property, etc., Tasheva stated.