Tbilisi Condemns Law on Abkhaz Citizenship

The Georgian Foreign Ministry condemned the law on citizenship, which was adopted by the Parliament of breakaway Abkhazia on October 24, as “a discriminative decision against almost all ethnic Georgians and persons of other nationalities of the region.”
 
According to the law on citizenship, the citizens of the Republic of Abkhazia are ethnic Abkhazians, regardless of the place of their residence or their citizenship; persons, who have been permanently living in Abkhazia for no less than five years following the adoption of the Act on Independence of the Republic of Abkhazia on October 12, 1999. At the same time, citizens of Abkhazia can simultaneously be citizens of the Russian Federation alone, according to the law. 
 
“Although all the decrees and legislative acts adopted by the Abkhaz separatist parliament are illegal and can be considered invalid, such actions by the Abkhaz de facto authorities try not only to preserve the current demographic situation in the region, which has artificially changed as a result of ethnic cleansing, but also to legitimize this cleansing,” the Georgian Foreign Ministry’s statement issued on November 2 reads.

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