OSCE Commissioner Urges Estonia to Widen Citizenship Circle
The OSCE's minorities commissioner has called for Estonia to give all children born in the country citizenship.
Although the share of stateless persons has fallen dramatically in recent years, the OSCE Commissioner for National Minorities Knut Vollebaek said on a visit to Estonia on June 9 that "everything possible" must be done to improve a situation where eight percent of the population lacks citizenship.
He allowed that the US-style policy he proposed could be voluntary, and that parents could waive the right.
Vollebaek, who met with Minister of Foreign Affairs Urmas Paet, said that he understood that there were "political differences" on the matter.
The differences do not necessarily run along ethnic lines. The Social Democrats introduced a bill in Parliament on June 9 that would allow citizenship to be granted to children under 15 years of age under simplified procedure.
According to the bill, instead of the parents having to apply for citizenship for their children, they would only have to take action if they did not want their children to obtain citizenship.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Paet said that many of the stateless lack incentive to apply for citizenship.
"Russia's decision from a few years ago to waive the visa requirement for stateless people traveling from Estonia to Russia very clearly did a disservice to the process," he said.
Paet said that a switch to an automatic citizenship policy would mean a big paradigm shift. "The process has been driven by free will up to now," he said.
"If children received it automatically, it would not be a conscious choice in many cases," said the minister, adding that currently the only action that it takes to obtain citizenship for children is ticking a box in a printed form. "But certainly Estonian society is mature enough today that we can weigh all sorts of proposals, certainly this one as well."
Vollebaek also said that increasing the amount of Estonian-language instruction in Russian schools should not mean a drop in quality.
And he criticized the Language Inspectorate, for, as he put it, punishing people and not motivating and supporting them enough.
But Paet noted that fines are infrequent and that the Language Inspectorate typically issues a reprimand seeking voluntary compliance.
Kristopher Rikken