A woman in Russia was detained abroad and her passport was canceled due to a technical error in the machine-readable zone of her international passport. The Primorsky Regional Court upheld the lower court's decision to pay a total of 298,471 rubles in compensation to the woman in a lawsuit against the Interior Ministry.
According to the statement by Yelena Olenyeva, press secretary for the Primorsky Regional judicial system, the error was detected while the woman was passing through border control abroad. After the passport was canceled, the woman was placed in a temporary detention room, and her minor son was accommodated in a hotel at her expense.
Olenyeva stated that the plaintiff spent the day trying to resolve the issue by contacting Russia's embassy in Thailand, the immigration office, and the tour company. After a long wait, the woman and her son had to return to Russia at their own expense.
The Interior Ministry's lawyers appealed to reduce the amount of moral damages, arguing that the police had issued a new passport and covered the ruined vacation expenses. However, the court panel ruled that there were no grounds for reducing the moral damages and upheld the lower court's decision.