This year, a woman asked the Right to Protection for help for a friend of her husband – he still had a passport of a citizen of the USSR and did not receive a Ukrainian passport.
In March 2020, our staff contacted this man.
His name is Pavlo. He was born in Georgia, from where he moved to Kharkiv in 1977. In 1990 he received a passport of a citizen of the USSR.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1993 the authorized bodies of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine added the inscription “citizen of Ukraine” to his identity document. However, the man never received a passport of a citizen of Ukraine.
Mr. Pavlo lives in a hospice. He recently had his leg amputated and needed immediate help, which was virtually impossible to obtain without valid documents.
After a detailed study of the situation, the lawyer of the Right to Protection CF assisted the man in preparing documents for applying to the State Migration Service of Ukraine (hereinafter – SMSU) with a statement on establishing citizenship of Ukraine. A joint visit was made with the staff of the SMSU of the Industrial District of Kharkiv to the hospice to receive the application documents from Pavlo and the documents attached to it. After the procedure, Mr. Pavlo received a certificate of registration of a person as a citizen of Ukraine.
With tears of undisguised joy in his eyes, Pavlo finally received the long-awaited passport of a citizen of Ukraine. From now on, he has the opportunity to enjoy social, economic, political and all other types of civil rights and freedoms that every citizen has.
It was result of the coordinated cooperation of the Right to Protection CF with the State Migration Service of Ukraine in Kharkiv region, and thanks to the incredible efforts and humanity of the management of SMSU of the Industrial District in Kharkiv – Ms. Kostromina Larysa and Ms. Rybalko Yuliya, who took all necessary steps to help Pavlo obtain a passport of a citizen of Ukraine.
We express our sincere gratitude to the employees of the State Migration Service of Ukraine in the Kharkiv region for effective cooperation in reducing statelessness!
