440,000 Belarusians Willing to Immigrate in 2002 :: Charter'97 :: News

This year the state bodies of Belarus considered over 10 thousand immigration applications, filed by Belarusian nationals in search of the permanent residence abroad. They mostly prefer to settle in Russia, USA, Israel and Ukraine. Such data were made public on December 13 during the Minsk round table on the issues of visa policy and frontier control, which attracted representatives of the Interior Ministry, Foreign Ministry and other state structures. Apart from the filling out of documents for permanent residence, the state institutions of Belarus also considered over 430 thousand applications for temporary foreign residence.

As noted by deputy head of the department for passport and visa services of the Interior Ministry of Belarus Valery Kozlovsky, in August 2002 there came into effect the new law “On citizenship in the Republic of Belarus”. The new law doesn’t differ a lot from the one, passed in 1991. The Republic of Belarus still does not recognize double citizenship, underlined Kozlovsky.