ANTON M. PLOKHOV, SENIOR LAWYER AT A.T.LEGAL

The malicious debtors, for whom bailiffs have restricted foreign travel, will remain without passports until repayment of obligations. This will close the loophole that allows the cunning bypassing the restriction and travel to resorts through neighboring countries. Even those who have no debts risk to remain without a passport if a border guard finds false information in the document or considers it unusable.

A popular option among domestic debtors in enforcement proceedings is to circumvent the travel ban by transit through neighboring states, such as Belarus. Thereafter, the debtor is safely directed from the territory of that State to the foreign country he needs, which he would not have been able to go to if he had left Russia. This scheme is viable because there is no border control between the countries of the Customs Union, and border officials of the respective countries do not check whether Russian citizens traveling abroad have debts under enforcement proceedings.

A way out of this situation could be the establishment of interdepartmental cooperation between the border authorities of Russia and the states that are members of the Customs Union. But at the same time in any case amendments to a significant number of normative acts will be required, including bilateral ones, which is associated with a number of difficulties. Therefore, it seems that the RF Federal Service for Financial Markets has decided to act radically: to completely eliminate the possibility for debtors to go abroad through manipulations with their passports. It is in this aspect that the proposal to introduce the procedure of invalidation of external passports should be assessed.

In addition to the fiscal component, the draft law allows to eliminate the uncertainty regarding legal consequences of changing the personal data of a person or obtaining a passport in violation of the procedure or with false documents. The falsity of the passport can be discovered, for example, when passing the border control, when a discrepancy between the personal data of a departing citizen and the data indicated in the passport (in case of a name change) is detected, or when the relevant authority receives information about the use of forged documents in issuing the passport. It is proposed to consider a foreign passport invalid if the name, surname, patronymic, date and place of birth, sex are changed. It is proposed to establish a total of 13 grounds on which a passport will be considered invalid. Depending on the grounds of invalidity the procedural aspects will differ. Thus, if the surname is changed, the passport will be invalid from the moment the surname is changed, i.e. no decision of the authorities will be required. In other cases, there must be a relevant decision of the authorized state body, which can be appealed to a higher authority or to the court.

It is proposed to consider recognition of its unsuitability for further use as one of the grounds for invalidity of the external passport. But the draft law does not specify the criteria of unsuitability. We believe that in this case by analogy we can use the criteria of unsuitability of a general civil passport of the Russian Federation, set out in paragraph 12 of the Regulations on the passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation.

Undoubtedly, the draft law brings a certain clarity to the legal regime of external passports. Previously, the domestic legislation did not clearly resolve issues related to the grounds for invalidity of external passports, which caused reasonable difficulties in practice and the emergence of conflict situations. There is no doubt that various abuses can be committed when obtaining and using passports, which is the purpose of the draft law. Now the state will be able to establish more effective control over the movement of citizens across the state border, which will favorably affect the security of society as a whole.

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