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IRL Favors Tougher Citizenship Requirements
In a survey of major political parties' views on integration, IRL came out in favor of tightening the language requirements for obtaining Estonian citizenship.
When asked in the ERR survey whether citizenship requirements should be eased, IRL representative Mart Nutt said that, on the contrary, they should be made more strict.
"Actually you don't need to know Estonian to get Estonian citizenship, it's enough to put check marks in the right boxes," he said.
Approximately 100,000 of Estonia's 1.3 million residents, mainly ethnic Russians, remain stateless - a legacy of the complex politics that followed the nation's break from the USSR in 1991. Obtaining Estonian citizenship requires passing a language and citizenship exam.
Representatives of the opposition Centre Party, Social Democrats and People's Union advocated simplifying the citizenship exam.
"Becoming a citizen should not be such a complicated process that people lose motivation," said Centre Party MP Enn Eesmaa.
Social democrat Vadim Belobrovtsev said that the Citizenship Act, which came into force 15 years ago, needs to be thoroughly reviewed.
In its stated platform the Social Democratic Party has pledged to support cultural autonomy and offer citizenship to all children born in Estonia to non-citizens, noted Raivo Vetik, a professor of comparative politics at Tallinn University, in a separate commentary.
For his part Paul-Eerik Rummo, answering the survey for the Reform Party, stressed the need for more active dissemination of information regarding the opportunities and procedures for obtaining citizenship.
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