Stateless persons face all sorts of difficulties and limitations throughout their lives. For many women without citizenship the situation is even more dire for absence of proper documents prevents them from registering birth of their children and, as a consequence such children are deprived of education and access to medical care. How not to give up under the pressure of such circumstances and continue fighting? Let us see how Svetlana Cherepkina from Kazakhstan did just that.
24 years ago Svetlana Cherepkina became a stateless person. She received a USSR passport in the city of Krasny Sulin in Rostov oblast of Russian Federation in August of 1995 and a year later that very passport was stolen from her.
“Myself and my kids were born in Kyrgyzstan, in Bishkek. It is the country that we call our own, we have been living here for nearly all of our life. In the 90-s my husband had to move to Russia and we went there all together. In fact, we did this trip twice – we lived for three years every time in Rostov oblast but because our life was in Kyrgyzstan we returned back home. In March 1996 we came back to Bishkek and my daughter Svetlana’s passport was stolen on the way home”.
The document was put on the shelf
Svetlana and her relates did everything they could to restore the identification documents but kept on encountering new challenges. Svetlana needed a certificate from Russia confirming the fact of their family really spending several years in Russia.
“We have been repeatedly requesting the certificate from Russia every six months to no avail, - says Irina Tohtakhunova. In order to send a new request we had to provide 10 other certificates from various institutions and we collected them twice a year. It was not free of charge either”.
