Information Note on the Court’s case-law 39

February 2002

Shevanova v. Latvia (dec.) - 58822/00

Decision 28.2.2002 [Section I]

Article 8

Article 8-1

Respect for family life

Expulsion from Latvia of former USSR national having lived there almost thirty years with her son: admissible

The applicant, a former national of the Soviet Union who currently has Russian nationality, settled in Latvia in 1970, where she marr ied and had a child in 1973 before divorcing. In 1981, thinking that she had lost her Soviet passport, she obtained a new one. In 1989 she found the missing passport but did not surrender it to the relevant authorities. In 1991, after the break-up of the S oviet Union, she became stateless and was entered in the Latvian registers as a permanent resident. Her son subsequently obtained the status of a “permanent resident without citizenship”. In 1994 a Latvian firm offered her a job in Russia, near Chechnya. T he firm advised her to acquire Russian nationality and to register officially as a Russian resident in order to facilitate the checks carried out by the Russian authorities in the areas where she would have to work. She forged a stamp on her old passport a ttesting that her name had been removed from the register of Latvian residents. She was subsequently registered as a Russian resident, acquiring Russian nationality in 1994. In 1998 she applied to the Latvian Interior Ministry’s Directorate for Nationality and Migration Affairs (“the Directorate”) for a passport as a “permanent resident without citizenship”, enclosing her second passport. While processing her application, the Directorate discovered that she had been registered as a Russian resident and had carried out various formalities using her old passport. In April 1998 the Directorate removed her name from the register of residents. She was served with a deportation order enjoining her to leave Latvia by June 1998, and was barred from entering Latvian territory for five years. The applicant applied to the courts to have the deportation order set aside and to be granted a permanent residence permit. Her application was dismissed, as were a subsequent appeal and an appeal on points of law. In 2000 the app licant and her son twice applied to the head of the Directorate to have the deportation order set aside and to be granted a permanent residence permit. They submitted that they had no family ties outside Latvia, where they had lived together for 26 years, and that the applicant’s deportation would constitute a serious interference with her right to respect for her family life, as enshrined in Article 8 of the Convention. Both applications were likewise refused. The applicant applied anew to the courts to ha ve the order set aside, but her application was once again declared inadmissible. A subsequent appeal and an appeal on points of law were likewise dismissed. In February 2001 she was arrested and taken to the detention centre for illegal immigrants, where a warrant of execution of the deportation order was served on her. Owing to the fact that she had been admitted to hospital, execution of the warrant was stayed in late February 2001 by the head of the Directorate, who requested the immigration police to o rder her release from the detention centre.

Admissible under Article 8.

© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.

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