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Russian parliament gives initial backing to bill banning bizarre baby names

Among the strangest names given by Muscovites to their children since 1998 are Dolphin, Nikolai-Nikita-Nil, Summerset Ocean, Princess Daniela, Sophia the Little Sun

MOSCOW, March 7. /TASS/. The State Duma lower house of Russian parliament gave initial backing on Tuesday to the bill, which would ban Russian parents from officially giving their children names consisting of numbers, abbreviations or obscene words. The bill was initiated by upper house’s lawmaker Valentina Petrenko.

The explanatory note to the bill explains that current legislation has no rules obliging the parents to give their offsprings only the names that don’t openly violate children’s interests and rights. The law does not specify measures to be taken when the fact of violation is evident, and such freedom of parental discretion in certain cases leads to abuse of parental rights, Valentina Petrenko says.

She suggests amendments to the federal law on Certificates of Registration. According to Federation Council lawmaker Petrenko, the names to be banned are those containing "digital and alphabetical symbols, numeral adjectives, symbols or any combination of symbols, ranks, posts, swear words and abbreviations"

Among the strangest names given by Muscovites to their children since 1998 are Dolphin, Nikolai-Nikita-Nil, Summerset Ocean, Princess Daniela, Sophia the Little Sun and by far the most outrageous one is BOChrVF260602 (which translates to "biological human object of the Voronin-Frolov family born on June 26, 2002").

BOChrVF260602, who is already 14, still has no ID papers since the Moscow registration office refused to register such an outlandish name, and subsequently a court upheld this ban.