How has the status of Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic changed thanks to the February amendment to the law known as “Lex Ukraine”? How has the Supreme Administrative Court dealt with the expulsion of Russian citizens, unlawful in one case and lawful in another?
The fourth amendment to so-called Lex Ukraine (Act No. 65/2022), i.e., amendment No. 24/2025, in force since 11 February 2025, has brought some changes which benefit Ukrainian refugees, but also substantial restrictions for citizens of the Russian Federation. In addition, the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic has passed two remarkable decisions: one that halted the expulsion of a Russian citizen and another that allowed for such expulsion on secret grounds (the latter having since been upheld by the Czech Constitutional Court).
I. Amendment to “Lex Ukraine” – Act No. 65/2022
Modifications to Lex Ukraine bring some relief and greater legal clarity for Ukrainian refugees who arrived in the Czech Republic after 24 February 2022. A number of refugees arrived earlier, and their status was until now unclear. The makeshift law that is Lex Ukraine, replacing against all common sense the Act on Temporary Protection (Act No. 221/2003, first made relevant by the EU decision of 4 March 2022), has already become a fixture of the Czech legal landscape.
Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic since February 2022, who number about 350,000, no longer perceive their stay to be temporary but increasingly accept it as a permanent feature of their lives. The EU has extended its relevant scheme until the end of March 2026, and Germany has extended Sec. 24 of its Act on Residence until the beginning of December 2025, but the new German government has indicated plans to make additional changes, especially for (or rather: to the detriment of) refugees newly arriving from Ukraine (ex.: no more so-called citizen’s income but welfare payments modelled upon those granted to asylum seekers, if without the requirement of fixed residence).
Consequently, the Czech lawmaker has created an option for those who enjoy “temporary protection” to switch to “special permanent residence” under Sec. 7o (that is “seven-oh”, rather than “seventy”) of Lex Ukraine, based on an application (termed “Declaration of interest”) and conditional upon a number of certain criteria on the part of the refugee. Among other things, the refugee must have a job, receive no welfare payments, etc. Decisions on such requests are always made on the level of entire families (see Sec. 7o, 7p, 7q, and 7r Lex Ukraine for the details).
Those Ukrainians who do not enjoy temporary protection but whose stay is being tolerated (as per Sec. 33 (1) (a) of the Czech Law on Aliens No. 326/1999) – i.e., individuals who fled Ukraine prior to mid-March 2022 when Lex Ukraine came into force, or who failed to qualify for temporary protection – apparently won’t have the opportunity to change their status (even though temporary protection is understood to be a form of toleration as per Sec. 4 (4) Lex Ukraine). Those Ukrainians, however, who enjoy temporary protection in other EU member states (and in Denmark, Norway, the UK, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, or Iceland) may newly switch countries as per Sec. 7d Lex Ukraine, i.e., they have a title to temporary protection in the Czech Republic, a form of secondary migration which was previously impossible, in particular due to the approach of the Czech Republic (which disregarded such requests as a matter of principle). Legal protection of Ukrainian refugees continues to be ruled out across the board (Sec. 5 (2) second sentence Lex Ukraine), in line with the Kafkaesque traditions of Czech officialdom. Family reunification, on the other hand, under Sec. 50 et seq. of the Act on Temporary Protection (No. 221/2003), which for all practical purposes was basically impossible, should see an improvement thanks to the new Sec. 7d.
In addition, Sec. 7h through 7n Lex Ukraine govern the newly established register of motor vehicles with Ukrainian license plates, making re-registrations unnecessary.
II. No Czech citizenship for Russian citizens
Sec. 7x and Sec. 7y of “Lex Ukraine” contain somewhat concealed provisions to the effect that pending naturalization proceedings of Russian citizens are to be discontinued and that no new applications for Czech citizenship by Russian citizens will be accepted for as long as Lex Ukraine is in force, i.e., until Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has come to an end. In systematic terms, these provisions should have been incorporated into the Czech Citizenship Act (Act No. 186/2013); they are misplaced in Lex Ukraine (in that they could equally have been inserted into the Waste Management Act or the Nuclear Energy Act by these tenuous standards). For this formal reason alone, Sec. 7x and Sec. 7y of Lex Ukraine are likely unconstitutional (which is already the subject matter of a review).
But it is especially with respect to their substance that these rules are highly contentious in constitutional terms, and rightly so: firstly, the toolkit of the Alien Act and Citizenship Act is perfectly sufficient for denying applications by high-risk individuals (or stripping them of their right to stay, and thereupon order them to leave the country – cf. the Lishchenuk case discussed further below in Section III), i.e., the ambiguous Sec. 7x and Sec. 7y were unnecessary in the first place. Secondly, they have the effect of false retroactivity (in that they interfere with pending administrative procedures).
At the same time, the new rules in Sec. 7x and Sec. 7y have perverse consequences in the case of Russian opposition members who cannot enter the Russian embassy in Prague (much less travel to the Russian Federation) to file expatriation requests without exposing themselves to extreme danger. Conversely, the Russian authorities cannot approve expatriation unless and until the Czech authorities vouch for the naturalization of the given individuals, or else they would run afoul of the 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. But the Czech proceedings have been discontinued and cannot be brought to completion. Things become completely muddy when one thinks about what should happen to individuals who were made Russian citizens on Crimea or in the occupied territories after 2014 – often against their will or with extreme coercion on the part of the Russian occupying authorities.
For all these reasons, Sec. 7x and Sec. 7y are thus likely unconstitutional, are contained in Lex Ukraine for no solid systematic reason, and are short-sighted and nonsensical in terms of their contents.
III. Banning the expulsion of one Russian citizen and allowing the expulsion of another for secret reasons
On 9 May 2024 (Victory Day in Russia, a national holiday), the Czech Supreme Administrative Court quashed, in a very compellingly argued judgment (Case Ref. No. 2 Azs 316/2023), an expulsion order against a Russian citizen who however was not informed of the country to which he should remove himself. The reason given in the judgment whereby the expulsion order was annulled was that the principle of non-refoulement must observed – i.e., a principle designed to avoid that an expelled alien ends up in the very country (here: the Russian Federation) from which they fled in the first place. In this particular case, the Russian citizen had argued that he was about to be drafted for military service. The agency which had wanted to deport him (and which reports to the Czech Ministry of the Interior) had found this argument moot since “mobilization in Russia is essentially complete” (as at the beginning of 2023 – clearly a manifest falsehood!). The Supreme Administrative Court thus annulled the decision by the Interior and returned the case for a re-trial.
The second case also concerned an expulsion order; here, the Russian citizen to be expelled was Nikolai Lishcheniuk (Hиколай Лищенюк), a priest of the Orthodox church in Karlovy Vary (here is his website with the Moscow Patriarchate: https://mospat.ru/ru/department/leaders/lischeniuk/). Lishcheniuk had been deprived of his permanent residency permit, based on classified state security reasons. The Supreme Administrative Court had condoned the measure (on 22 February 2024. Case Ref. No. 9 Azs 30/2024), and the Czech Constitutional Court upheld it on 12 June 2024 (which happens to be “Russia Day”, the national holiday of sovereign Russia; Case Ref. No. III. ÚS 1151/24). For once, this case proves that Sec. 7x and Sec. 7y of Lex Ukraine are superfluous: even now, foreigners can be deprived of their permit to stay if security reasons so warrant. In the case of Lishcheniuk, Czech weekly “Respekt” reported (in its issue of 30 December 2024) that there was ample evidence to suggest that the priest had allowed the Russian secret service FSB and the Russian military intelligence GRU to repeatedly use church premises and nearby community space in Karlovy Vary for clandestine meetings. The fact that Lishcheniuk was decorated in 2024 by a badge “For Cooperation” by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (“нагрудный знак МИД России «За взаимодействие»”, cf. the website linked above) certainly fits the picture. In this sense, it is self-evident that the residence of high-risk foreigners should be terminable, if reasons of this kind are present. On the other hand, however, it is more reminiscent of Kafka than of an EU member state that such reasons should be kept secret, which deprives the foreigner of the possibility to dispel the concerns. This is highly unusual in any country that honors the rule of law, and it is unclear how this can be constitutional – in this particular respect, the decision of the Czech Constitutional Court is not compelling. Surely it should have been possible to reveal the reasons of national security to the defense counsel and to the court, if to no one else, possibly under a pledge to secrecy.
Source:
Act No. 24/2025 Coll.
Act No. 65/2022 Coll.
Supreme Administrative Court decision 2 Azs 316/2023