On the Gosuslugi portal, the possibility of replacing a passport for transgender people was returned «due to a change in gender,» Novaya Gazeta was told at the Sphere Charitable Foundation*. Human rights organizations have been pushing for these changes for more than a year since the disappearance of the service in 2020.
A collective complaint about the inability to apply for a replacement passport due to gender change was filed at the beginning of October 2021. Among the applicants are the Sphere Foundation, the Russian LGBT Network**, the public movement Mayak**, AIDS.CENTER and others.
The addressee of the complaint is the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass communications, the Ministry of Economic Development, the Prosecutor General's Office and the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation.
As human rights activists pointed out, the impossibility to apply for a passport replacement due to gender reassignment through the “Gosuslugi” is a violation of the administrative regulations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the provision of public services for the issuance, replacement of passports of a Russian citizen, since the process of replacing a passport for transgender people turned out to be complicated and they were deprived of a discount to pay the state duty.
The State Services Portal with the ability to replace a passport due to gender reassignment
A lot of people use the opportunity to apply for a passport replacement through the State Services portal, this not only saves on the amount of the fee, but also significantly speed up the process of obtaining documents, at a convenient time for the applicant, says Ekaterina Dikovskaya, a lawyer for the Sphere Charitable Foundation.
“Back in 2020, it seemed strange to us that the technical possibility of submitting documents was lost specifically for people who changed their sex, although for all other cases of replacing documents, everything worked. But we are very pleased that the Ministry of Digital Transformation nevertheless solved all the technical problems, although it did not go without contacting the prosecutor's office, ”she said.