Dear Madame Chair! In Estonia, 6% of people are stateless. The majority of them are Russians. This means that every fourth Russian resident in our country is a stateless person. This is despite the fact that Russians have been living in Estonia for several generations. Over the last 27 years, Estonian authorities have pursued a policy of marginalizing the Russian national minority by depriving them of their civil and political rights, including by depriving them of their citizenship at the beginning of the 1990s. Now, obviously, the whole calculation of the Estonian authorities is based on the fact that non-citizens will die sooner or later of natural causes, and thus the problem will be “solved”. We cannot agree with such an approach. In our opinion, such a large number of stateless people is clear evidence of discrimination and segregation in our country. It is segregation based on ethnicity. Estonian authorities claim that Russians have the “right’ to obtain citizenship through naturalization, but, in our opinion, this is a discriminatory “right”. While representatives of the titular Estonian nation obtain citizenship without any additional requirements, Russians in Estonia must undergo the difficult process of naturalization. This is clear discrimination based on ethnicity. Thank you for your attention!