EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN ACTION / Alla Tymofeyeva (ed.)

exceptional circumstances. Although the Minister of the Interior’s orders did not state why such an exception did not apply in the applicants’ case, the Administrative Court found the orders to be lawful, since the Foreigners’ Act in any case did not permit extensions of residence permits of persons who had committed themselves to leaving Estonia and who had received accommodation abroad within the framework of an international aid programme. It dismissed the applicants’ claim that their legitimate expectation rights and the principle of legal certainty had been violated, holding that the principle of legitimate expectation could not be extended so far as to prevent the legislator from making any changes to the legislation in force at any point of time. The Administrative Court rejected the complaint concerning the violation of the right to family and private life, finding that the applicants could enjoy family life in the country of which they were nationals and in which they had undertaken to settle, when consenting to participate in the aid programme. In an appeal to the Tallinn Court of Appeal the applicants stressed that the first applicant’s elderly parents, whom the applicants had to take care of, lived in Estonia. The second applicant had been born in Estonia and had been living there ever since. The first applicant had lived in Estonia for fifty years. They supported financially their children, who lived in Estonia, including one child who lived together with them. Also their grandchildren lived in Estonia. The first applicant had opted for the aid programme and adopted Russian nationality only because of the lack of certainty as to the possibility to remain living in Estonia. On 6 January 2003 the Tallinn Court of Appeal upheld the judgment of the Administrative Court. The Court of Appeal noted that in his written consent to take part in the aid programme, the first applicant had stated that the size of his family was four persons, including the two sons. Thus, the first applicant had known already at the time he had been consenting to take part in the aid programme that his parents would remain in Estonia. On 20 May 2003 the Supreme Court upheld the judgments. It reiterated that on 26 July 1994 Estonia and the Russian Federation had concluded a treaty concerning the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Estonia. According to the treaty the Russian military servicemen and their family members had to leave Estonia. The United States aid programme had been set up to facilitate the resettling of the military servicemen. The fact that Estonia had not been a party to the programme, did not, in the Supreme Court’s view, exclude the legitimacy of the enactment and application of the provision of the Foreigners’ Act, under which the applicants had been denied the extensions of the residence permits. The Supreme Court agreed with the opinion of the Court of Appeal that in case the first applicant’s parents wished to stay in Estonia, the grown- up children of the applicants could take care of them. On 5 September 2003 the Citizenship and Migration Board issued a precept to the applicants requiring them to leave Estonia. The applicants complied with the precept and cancelled their registration of residency in Paldiski. According to the population registration database the applicants left Estonia on 25 November 2003 and settled in Smolensk. In the applicants’ submission they had to leave Estonia in December 2003, after the police had entered their flat in November in order to execute the precepts by force. The applicants submitted that Article 4 of Protocol No. 4 to the Convention prohibiting collective expulsion of aliens had been violated, since altogether about 117 former Soviet army servicemen and their family members would be denied extensions of their residence permits.

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