More than 1,400 people in Moldova, including children, have indefinite legal status
In 2017, a legislative change in the Republic of Moldova put hundreds of stateless persons and persons with indefinite legal status in the difficult situation of not being able to provide documents to children born in our country. The children cannot be enrolled in kindergarten, cannot be vaccinated, their parents cannot receive allowances for them. Late last year, Parliament voted in first reading on amendments to the Citizenship Law, which would regulate the situation of these people.
Alina is 27 years old. She was born in Ukraine and is not a citizen of our country. Alina is the mother of two children. Her baby boy, born in 2021, does not have a birth certificate and therefore does not receive any allowances.
"My biggest problem is that I can't register my one year and three months old son. He was born at the Mother and Child Centre in Chisinau, and they didn't issue me a birth certificate because I don't have an identity card. Wherever we don't go they ask me for a certificate, and I can't work anyplace", says Alina Margina.
Until 2017, according to the Lawyers' Law Centre (CDA), the Moldovan Citizenship Law stipulated that any child born on the territory of our country to at least one Moldovan citizen parent is also a Moldovan citizen. At the same time, a child born to foreign or stateless parents can acquire the citizenship of our state, if the country of origin does not offer citizenship. Following amendments to the Law on Citizenship five years ago, granting citizenship of the Republic of Moldova was linked to the parents' residence in our country.
"And if somehow the parents on the day of the child's birth had no visa, or missed the plane and 150 various other situations, that child does not acquire citizenship of the Republic of Moldova? If the mother has no documents, the issue of documenting the child remains suspended, because the first person to be documented is the mother. But how does the child go to the doctor, but how is that child vaccinated? No way!", points out the executive director of the CDA, Oleg Palii.
At last year's plenary session of the Parliament, the first reading of the draft law amending the Citizenship Law was voted to avoid statelessness at birth.
"If now, in the law's formula that was before I came up with the amendment proposal, only children born on the territory of the Republic of Moldova whose parents, at least one of them, had to have the right of residence could benefit from citizenship by birth, now my idea and proposal is to exclude this phrase, so that all children born on the territory of the Republic of Moldova would benefit from citizenship", says MP Angela Munteanu-Pojoga, author of the draft law.
Experts say that by 2017, the Republic of Moldova ranked among the top five countries in the world with clear procedures for determining statelessness status laid down in law. Official data also show that at the end of 2022 there were more than 1,400 people with undetermined legal status living in Moldova, including several dozen children.
