The Crimean Tatar Resource Centre submitted a report to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for the UN High Commissioner’s study on general birth registration and the use of digital technologies.
The CTRC provided information on obtaining a birth certificate for a child in Ukraine, in particular the procedure for obtaining this document in the occupied Crimea.
‘As a rule, the majority of Ukrainian citizens have no problems with obtaining a birth certificate for a child, and such children are not restricted in the realisation of their rights: medical care, education and etc. However, the situation with children birth on the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine looks different. First of all, we are talking about children who were born in Crimea after 2014. Since the Ukrainian authorities do not recognise any documents, including medical ones, issued by the occupation authorities, Ukrainian legislation provides for a special procedure for registering such children,’ the report says.
The experts highlighted several problems:
1. Parents or other legal representatives of a child born in Crimea must apply to the court with an application to establish the fact of birth, provide the necessary evidence and pay the court fee. Unfortunately, in practice, obtaining such a decision can take months. After receiving the court decision to establish the fact of birth, the parents or the child’s legal representative apply to the civil registration authority with a copy of the decision and a copy of the passport and obtain a birth certificate for the child. That is, in order to obtain a child’s birth certificate, residents of the occupied peninsula must be on the territory of Ukraine controlled by the Ukrainian authorities, and no electronic services are provided for them.
2. Due to Russia’s full-scale armed aggression against Ukraine and the ongoing occupation of Crimea, thousands of Crimeans have been forced to leave for third countries. Many of them left with their children and are still unable to obtain Ukrainian-style documents (passports) for children born after 2014, as they do not have Ukrainian birth certificates. At the same time, such children cannot study in Ukrainian schools on a distance learning basis, as enrolment in such schools requires a Ukrainian birth certificate.
3. Children who are abroad and whose parents have been granted temporary protection or refugee status study in local schools on the basis of the general right to education, but there is no question of granting citizenship to such children. At the same time, further legalisation in the Ukrainian legal system and recognition of these children as Ukrainian citizens is in question, and already now residents of the peninsula face problems in obtaining a Ukrainian passport and accessing most state services, even if they have a Ukrainian birth certificate.
‘Therefore, it is important to introduce a mechanism that would allow foreign diplomatic institutions of Ukraine to issue birth certificates to children born in temporarily occupied Crimea without going to court,’ the document stressed.