Last week Latvia’s foreign minister Baiba Braže announced that the procedure had begun for placing Russian journalist Leonid Ragozin on the list of undesirable individuals, or personae non gratae.
Braže had earlier been urged to do so by Latvia’s interior minister Jānis Dombrava. In his view, Ragozin “publicly expresses views sharply at odds with Latvia’s national interests.” Specifically, he accused the journalist of blaming the West for Russia’s aggressive actions, of claiming that sanctions are ineffective, and of discrediting Ukraine, its political leadership and its armed forces.
According to Mediazona, Ragozin previously worked for the BBC Russian Service and the magazine Russian Newsweek. More recently he has published columns in various outlets — and in one of his latest pieces he argued that Russians regard the West as a greater threat than their own authoritarian government, and that the West has obstructed every opportunity for a diplomatic settlement of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that began in 2014.
EXILWS’s lawyer in Latvia, Jelizaveta Krivcova, explains how the procedure for designating someone a persona non grata works — and how it has turned into an instrument for restricting the rights of foreign nationals.
Latvia maintains a national immigration “blacklist.” It covers foreign nationals holding residence permits or visas whose presence in the country is undesirable on diplomatic or national security grounds. Entries can be made by either the interior minister or the foreign minister. The procedures used by the two ministries, however, differ.
The Interior Ministry can place a person on the blacklist on the basis of an assessment by the security services that the individual concerned is dangerous. Such a decision can be appealed, but only at a single level of jurisdiction — the Regional Administrative Court. Moreover, the ministry can decline to disclose the case materials in court, citing the secrecy of intelligence and counter-intelligence information.
Often a person placed on the list receives a single sentence by way of justification — and then has to guess what factual information might have led to that conclusion. Any effective defence here is impossible.
The Constitutional Court is currently examining a claim I prepared in a similar case, alleging a violation of the right to a fair trial. The hearing will take place on 20 October, and we expect a ruling at the end of the year.
Now for blacklisting via the Foreign Ministry, which is what Ragozin faces. In this case no security service assessment is required at all. In declaring foreign nationals personae non gratae, the ministry relies on nothing but its own good faith and common sense. There is no way to appeal such a decision.
The persona non grata status was in fact designed for the expulsion of representatives and staff of diplomatic missions. Ministers, however, frequently abuse this power and place other foreign nationals on the list as well.
What has emerged is a mechanism for restricting a foreign national’s rights that requires no justification from the minister (a statement to the press suffices) and that cannot be challenged through ordinary channels. The only procedural route available is to challenge the law itself, which grants the Foreign Ministry such sweeping powers, before the Constitutional Court.
Before the Constitutional Court one can seek to limit the Foreign Ministry’s power to blacklist any foreign national at will. The minister should hold that power only in accordance with Article 9 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations — that is, when declaring a diplomat a persona non grata. All other categories of foreign nationals lawfully residing in Latvia have a right to respect for their private life, and should therefore have a right to appeal a decision placing them on the blacklist.
Why did the Interior Ministry not blacklist Ragozin itself, instead demanding that the Foreign Ministry do it? Apparently the ministry concluded that a decision bearing its own signature would not survive even the defective appeal procedure that does exist. So it preferred to turn to the Foreign Ministry, whose decisions cannot be appealed at all.
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