 Source: HRO.org (info) A court found no evidence of criminal action in the activities of the passport control officials at Sheremetyevo Airport after an investigation which revealed that the director of the Centre for the Promotion of Indigenous Peoples with Small Populations of the North, Rodion Suliandziga, had a page torn out from his passport, which prevented him from flying to a UN conference. As reported by Rosbalt, Suliandziga said that the decision of the Court of Appeal was that: "The case is closed. It turns out that ‘no one is to blame.’ The page of my passport was not torn out by me, nor by passport control. It tore itself out." The civil society activist pointed out that he had now "learned from bitter experience" and that in advance of each inspection of his travel documents, he would make a special request that it be verified all the pages of his passport are in order. "I got a new passport, but I remain on the blacklist. At every passport control, I was checked very carefully. Everyone is looking for something," he said. Earlier it had been reported by participants in the UN Conference on Indigenous Issues that they had their passports taken away at Sheremetyevo Airport and had them returned damaged, and they were informed that it is not possible to travel abroad with such documents. A representative of the Crimean Tatar people, in turn, spoke about the theft of his passport by an unknown person, and a representative of the Mejlis was taken off a train from Kiev to Crimea and was also deprived of her passport. The President of the Sami Parliament of the Kola Peninsula was stopped several times by highway patrol police, and in one incident she was attacked by unknown persons. Translated by Graham Jones |
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