RIGA, Sept. 12 (Xinhua) -- Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis has put before lawmakers a new bill that would allow non-citizens' children to become Latvian citizens at birth, but one of the partners in Latvia's center-right government coalition has already promised to block its passage in parliament, local media reported.
The rightist National Alliance has said it will exercise its veto rights under the coalition agreement to prevent the draft law from being adopted.
Vejonis proposes to stop registering non-citizens' children, born after June 1, 2018, as non-citizens and grant them Latvian citizenship unless their parents choose to register them as citizens of some other country. The president believes that this would help consolidate the Latvian nation on the basis of common values.
The president reminded that non-citizenship status was introduced in Latvia and its neighbor Estonia as a temporary solution in the early 1990s. At present, however, babies born to non-citizens are only registered as non-citizens in Latvia.
"Ending the registration of children as non-citizens is a symbolic step that would end the divisions purposefully created between various groups of Latvia's society," Vejonis said, adding that doing away with non-citizenship would enable consolidation of Latvia's society, allowing to devote all efforts to the country's development.
If the bill is adopted, it would apply to approximately 50 to 80 newsborns a year. Last year, 52 babies born in Latvia were registered as non-citizens.
Although the president's initiative has already been endorsed by the opposition leftist Harmony party, Edgars Tavars, the leader of the ruling Green Party, a group of lawmakers who recently left the ruling center-right Unity party to form a new liberal party, as well as Ombudsman Juris Jansons, its future is quite uncertain because the National Alliance's resistance, which can threaten the coalition's stability.
Latvian Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis said Tuesday morning that he would not risk a disintegration of the current government coalition and that the president's citizenship proposal would therefore be rejected.
Under the current legislation, effective since 2013, non-citizens' children can be registered as Latvian citizens if at least one of the parents has expressly declared such a wish.
Since the mid-1990s when non-citizens made up 29 percent of Latvia's population, their share has contracted to 11 percent, according to the data of the Latvian citizenship and migration authority.
