A bill submitted to the State Duma suggests that the indigenous national minorities in the north will receive social pensions based on the information from the list of people belonging to these ethnicities of Russia.

State Duma deputy in the eighth convocation, Yelena Yevtyukhova, noted that if the information on these people is not recorded in the Register of the Indigenous Minorities of the North, they “will have to present documents that confirm they belong to the minorities of the north.”

“I would like to recall that in February 2020, the Federal Law on the Guarantees of the Rights of the Indigenous Minorities of the Russian Federation” was supplemented by the appendix on the accounting of the people who belong to these minorities,” Ms Yeftyukhova reported.

Starting February 7, 2022, the bodies of state authority, local self-government and state extra-budget funds will use the information from the list of minorities with a view to ensuring the implementation of their rights. So they will not have to present a package of documents themselves to confirm their ethnicity. The authorized bodies will receive the required information through the interdepartmental communications system from the Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs of Russia (FAEA).

In Chukotka, the authorities are already including people belonging to indigenous minorities in the register that is designed to simplify the implementation of their rights and guarantees. In all, 1,130 applications for inclusion in the list were sent to the FAEA from Chukotka.