There is no provision for officially recording a person’s ethnicity or national origin

The response of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine fully reproduces the official position of the State Migration Service, confirming that Ukrainian legislation does not provide for the legal recording of a citizen’s nationality in any documents, including passports, birth certificates, and civil status records.

The Ministry explicitly states that there is no state accounting of ethnic affiliation and refers to the Constitution of Ukraine and international non-discrimination standards, thereby substituting them for the right to ethnic identity recognized by international law.

However, behind this formal “equality” lies a deliberate and legally codified mechanism for excluding the titular nation — ethnic Ukrainians — from the category of subjects of collective rights.

Law No. 1616-IX “On Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine” (2021) limits the recognition of collective rights exclusively to three groups — Crimean Tatars, Karaites, and Krymchaks — thereby deliberately excluding both the titular Ukrainian ethnocultural group and all other autochthonous and diaspora communities that do not fall under this narrow definition.

Ethnic Ukrainians are the only autochthonous group for which the Ukrainian legal system provides no form of collective subjectivity — not as a people, not as a minority, and not as an indigenous population.

In addition, Law No. 2827-IX “On National Minorities (Communities) of Ukraine” of 13 December 2022 complements this legal construct by granting collective rights only to ethnic groups that are not ethnic Ukrainians.

According to Article 1 of this law, a national minority is defined as “a stable group of citizens of Ukraine who are not ethnic Ukrainians,” which explicitly introduces the criterion of excluding the titular nation from the scope of the law.

This means that ethnic Ukrainians cannot be officially recognized as a national minority and are thus deprived of access to legal mechanisms for collective identity, cultural autonomy, representation, and international protection afforded to other groups.

Law No. 2215-IX “On De-Sovietization of the Legislation of Ukraine” of 21 April 2022 provides for the systematic removal from the legal field of acts of the Ukrainian SSR, including those that were fundamental to the formation of Ukrainian statehood.

According to Clause 2 of Section I of this law, references to acts adopted before 24 August 1991 are excluded from legislation unless they were explicitly included in the list of valid normative legal acts.

Since the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine No. 55-XII of 16 July 1990 was neither reinstated nor re-recognized as valid by a separate law, it is no longer considered a source of current law.

In effect, Law No. 2215-IX did not simply eliminate Soviet terminology but eliminated the principal founding document that recognized the Ukrainian people as the bearer of sovereignty.

As a result, the only legal basis for recognizing Ukrainians as the titular nation with a right to land, historical continuity, and statehood was removed from Ukraine’s legal system.

This means that collective rights were reserved only for a narrow list of artificially codified ethnic groups, while the majority population lost even the right to the legal recognition of their ethnic identity.

The Ministry of Justice essentially justifies the state policy of refusing to record nationality in personal documents, while completely ignoring international legal standards, including:

– Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (the right of all peoples to self-determination),

– Article 1 of the UN Charter (equality and self-determination of peoples),

– Articles 1, 2, and 26 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (prohibition of distinctions based on ethnic origin),

– Articles 3, 5, and 9 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the right to recognition, identity, and protection from assimilation).

Thus, the official position of the Ministry of Justice confirms the existence of a state model of legal apartheid.

Under the guise of universal civic identity, ethnic segregation is effectively carried out, within which the titular Ukrainian ethnocultural group is deprived of the right to recognition, protection, and collective representation.

The refusal to record nationality is framed as a “right to self-determination,” but in practice it becomes an instrument of legal destruction of the ethnic identity of one particular group — the Ukrainians.

This corresponds to the characteristics of internal colonialism, in which the titular nation, despite having formal statehood, is excluded from the legal system, while legal mechanisms of collective representation and international protection are established for groups with external (transnational) backing.

In such a system, the people who are the source of sovereignty cease to exist as a legal subject.

In this context, the refusal to record nationality in documents is not an expression of equality, but a legal technology of exclusion.

It is the exclusion of the titular people from international jurisdiction, their removal from the right to representation and participation in the legal structure of their own state.

This approach constitutes a direct violation of the foundational norms of international law and must be qualified as legal apartheid.