Latvia off the hook for Soviet-era pension obligations

STRASBOURG, France (CN) — Latvia prevailed Thursday in a 20-year disagreement over the pensions of noncitizen residents, with the European Court of Human Rights ruling that Riga was not obliged to ensure pension equity between citizens and residents who could have obtained Latvian citizenship but never did. 

“There has been no violation of the convention,” ECHR President Robert Spano said when reading the judgment on Thursday. The court was created in 1959 by the European Convention of Human Rights, which protects the civil and political rights of Europeans. 

A group of five retirees, Jurijs Savickis, Genadijs Nesterovs, Vladimirs Podoļako, Asija Sivicka and Marzija Vagapova, brought the complaint. The group, all between the ages of 74 and 83, are settled in Latvia now but born in various parts of the USSR. After the court concluded in a prior case that a woman born in Kazakhstan but who moved to Latvia as a child was entitled to a larger pension, the group applied to have their state pensions increased in 2009. 

Latvia’s high court, the Constitutional Court of Latvia, would rule against them, saying the country has no responsibility for the financial obligations of an occupying state. The Soviet Union forcibly incorporated the Baltic country in 1940 and occupied the country until Latvia declared its independence in 1991. 

When the country created a social security system in 1996, it calculated the state’s pension obligation based on years of employment in Latvia. Citizens of the country could all count years of employment in other territories of the Soviet Union, but nonnationals could not. The five workers complained to the Strasbourg-based court that this difference was discriminatory. 

The court concluded that Latvia was not obliged to pay pension contributions created by an invading state. “Upon the restoration of its independence Latvia was not obliged to assume the responsibilities of the USSR,” the 17-judge panel wrote. 

It wasn’t the first time the regulations had landed before the Strasbourg-based court. Another Latvian resident, Natalija Andrejeva, first filed a complaint with the court in 2000. Born in Kazakhstan, she moved to Latvia at the age of 12 and was later employed by the Ministry of the Chemical Industry under the former USSR in Latvia. She retired in 1997, and the Latvian Social Security Directorate concluded that, as a noncitizen resident, she could only accrue a pension from her time employed in Latvia, a period that began only in 1991. The ECHR found this discriminatory in 2009 and awarded Andrejeva 6,500 euros ($6,900). 

In Andrejeva’s case, nationality was the sole distinguishing factor in the different pension assessments. Some of the group in the latest dispute hadn’t moved to Latvia until they were well into adulthood. One woman — Vagapova — didn’t start working in Latvia until she was 44. Others had only worked in the country intermittently during their careers and were receiving state pensions from other countries where they had been employed. 

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