Latvia’s non-citizens ask Russian parliament for help

Latvia is home to more than 2 million people including around 320,000 non-citizens

MOSCOW,  /TASS/ —  The head of Latvian non-citizens’ public organization, the Parliament of Unrepresented, Alexander Gaponenko, said on Thursday he has asked Russia’s lower house of parliament to provide the organization with judicial support.

“We need help in the fight in judicial authorities. We can make noise and shout, but we need judicial assistance,” Gaponenko told a roundtable at the State Duma on the problem of non-citizens in Latvia and Estonia.

“We would accept your help with pleasure,” Gaponenko told the head of the State Duma foreign affairs committee, Alexey Pushkov.

The Parliament of Unrepresented was established in Latvia by a human rights movement, the Congress of non-citizens, following the 2013 elections as a body representing the interests of mostly Russian-speaking population in the judicial, political and economic spheres of the republic.

One of the movement’s activists, Elizaveta Krivtsova, said earlier in the interview with TASS “our main goal is that the institute of mass non-citizenship in Latvia should be eliminated by any legal means.”

One of the first steps of the Parliament of Unrepresented was to send a request to the UN leadership on the assistance in regulating the problems of mass non-citizenship in Latvia.

Latvia is home to more than 2 million people including around 320,000 non-citizens.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, these citizens were deprived of the majority of political, social and economic rights. Latvia’s parliament continues rejecting the attempts of the Russian-speaking opposition to change the situation over non-citizenship.