37 ENDNOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 10 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 While the process of birth registration in most cases does not, itself, confer nationality – this is usually acquired automatically at birth, under operation of the nationality law – it does provide vital evidence of the facts of birth, without which a child’s claim to nationality may not be recognized by the state in question. See further section 6 of this report. Ionela’s story is told in more detail in the ENS publication Ending Childhood Statelessness: A Study on Romania, 2015. Note that this report uses the terms “nationality” and “citizenship” interchangeably – both denoting a legal bond between a person and a state. “Child” is defined in article 1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child as “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier” (although the Committee on the Rights of the Child encourages states to review the age of majority if this is set below 18). A stateless person is someone “who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law”. Article 1 of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. See for guidance on the interpretation of this definition UNHCR, Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons, 30 June 2014. See, for instance, UNHCR and Plan International, Under the radar and under protected. The urgent need to address stateless children’s rights, 2012. Keynote address by Nils Muižnieks, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights at the First Global Forum on Statelessness, The Hague, 1517 September 2014. Remarks by Louise Aubin, Deputy Director in the Division of International Protection at UNHCR, at the ENS regional conference on Preventing Childhood Statelessness in Europe, Budapest, 2-3 June 2015. For statistics on persons affected by statelessness, see UNHCR, Global Trends 2014: World at War, 2015. See http://ibelong.unhcr.org/en/home.do. See, in particular, Actions 2 and 7 of the UNHCR Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 2014-2024. Building on the earlier ENS publication Preventing childhood statelessness in Europe: Issues, gaps and good practices, 2014. These country studies were carried out in: Albania, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Macedonia, Poland, Romania and Slovenia. See for further details Annex 4. Note that by drawing data from these eight studies, the report relies significantly on these countries to illustrate problems and good practices present in the region, but other problems and good practices may arise elsewhere and may not have been identified in this report. This analysis targeted a total of 45 countries and is presented in section 3. See also the separate ENS publication Ending Childhood Statelessness: A comparative study of safeguards to ensure the right to a nationality for children born in Europe, 2015. UNHCR, Ending statelessness within 10 years: A special report, 2014. See Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless, 2014; and “Counting the world’s stateless: reflections on statistical reporting on statelessness” in UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2013, 2 February 2015. The need for states to collect disaggregated data in order to monitor and ensure the realisation of children’s rights has been emphasised by the Committee on the Rights of the Child in General Comment No. 5: General Measures of Implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, CRC/GC/2003/5, 27 November 2003. These were Latvia and Estonia. See further below. See, for instance, Action 10 of the UNHCR Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 2014-2024. See section 2 of the Conference Action Statement “None of Europe’s Children Should be Stateless”, 3 June 2015, in Annex 3. From a total of over 260,000 persons affected. Figure for the beginning of 2015. See ENS, Ending Childhood Statelessness: A Study on Latvia, 2015. From a total of over 88,000 persons affected. Figure for August 2014. See ENS, Ending Childhood Statelessness: A Study on Estonia, 2015. See K. Koleson, Tackling childhood statelessness in Ukraine, paper presented at the ENS Conference “None of Europe’s Children Should be Stateless, 2015, page 9-10. The reported figure for the total number of stateless persons in Ukraine at the end of 2014 was 35,335. See UNHCR, Global Trends 2014. The reported figure for the total number of stateless persons in the Russian Federation is 113,474. See UNHCR, Global Trends 2014. UNHCR, Global Trends 2014. Some limited data has been captured, for instance numbers relating to the implementation of safeguards against childhood statelessness at the municipal level: 11 children were granted nationality in the Municipality of Rome during 2012-2014 based on a safeguard in the law for children born in the territory who would otherwise be stateless. ENS, Ending Childhood Statelessness: A Study on Italy, 2015. Figure for end of 2014, as reported online by Statistics Sweden. Figure for November 2013. UNHCR, Mapping Statelessness in Iceland, December 2014. For a further discussion of this problematic administrative category, see section 3 of this report. 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 Figure for end of 2014, as reported online by the German Federal Statistical Office. Figure for 1 January 2012. Advisory Committee on Migration Affairs, No country of one’s own: An advisory report on treaty protection for stateless persons in the Netherlands [Dutch language version], 2013. G. Gyulai, Nationality Unknown? An overview of the safeguards and gaps related to the prevention of statelessness at birth in Hungary, Hungarian Helsinki Committee, January 2014. ENS, Ending Childhood Statelessness: A Study on Poland, 2015. UNHCR/Asylum Aid, Mapping Statelessness in the United Kingdom, November 2011. See, for example, Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 31: Nature of the General Legal Obligations imposed on States Parties to the Covenant, 26 May 2004. See in particular Committee on the Rights of the Child, General Comment No. 6: Treatment of unaccompanied and separated children outside their country of origin, 1 September 2005. See, for example, UN Human Rights Council, Human rights and arbitrary deprivation of nationality: report of the Secretary-General, A/HRC/19/43, 19 December 2011. An early international treaty to address this question, dating from the time of the League of Nations, was the 1930 Hague Convention on Certain Questions relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws. These include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (article 24); the Convention on the Rights of All Persons with Disabilities (article 18); and numerous regional human rights instruments. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes, more generally, that “everyone has the right to a nationality”. A more comprehensive overview of norms relating to nationality and statelessness in universal and regional human rights instruments can be found online, on UNHCR’s Refworld website. Emphasis added. See also UNICEF, Implementation Handbook for the Convention on the Rights of the Child (section on article 7), 2007. See further Committee on the Rights of the Child, General Comment No. 5: General measures of implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, CRC/GC/2003/5, 27 November 2003. Article 6 CRC. Article 3 CRC. Article 12 CRC. Article 2 CRC. UNHCR and Plan International, Under the radar and under protected. The urgent need to address stateless children’s rights, 2012. On the importance of implementing child rights in early childhood see, for instance, UN General Assembly Resolution 65/197, Rights of the Child, A/RES/65/197, 21 December 2010. See for specific guidelines on the interpretation of international norms relating to the prevention of childhood statelessness in light of the CRC and the principle of best interests of the child, UNHCR, Guidelines on Statelessness No. 4: Ensuring Every Child’s Right to Acquire a Nationality through Articles 1-4 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, HRC/GS/12/04, 21 December 2012. See sections 3 and 4 of this report for problematic areas of policy in Europe in this respect. See, for instance, the situations discussed in section 5 of this report. A detailed analysis of the work of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in respect of children’s right to a nationality – covering not just Europe, but all regions of the world – is provided in a forthcoming policy paper by the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. See Annex 3, sections 4 and 5. European Court of Human Rights, Genovese v. Malta, Application No. 53124/09, 11 October 2011. European Court of Human Rights, Mennesson v. France, Application No. 65192/11, 26 June 2014. Ibid, para. 99. In Genovese v. Malta the Court found a violation of article 14 of the ECHR (prohibition of discrimination) in conjunction with article 8 (private life). See in particular para. 34. European Court of Human Rights (Grand Chamber), Kuric and others v. Slovenia, Application No. 26828/06, 26 June 2012. See also, more generally, on special consideration for the circumstance of statelessness, Andrejeva v. Latvia, Application No. 55707/00, 18 February 2009; Kim v. Russia, Application No. 44260/13, 17 July 2014. In the classic example, where a child is born on a country that grants nationality by descent (from citizen parents, jus sanguinis), but his/her parents are citizens of a country that grants nationality by virtue of birth on the territory ( jus soli). There are in fact two UN conventions dedicated to addressing statelessness, the other one being the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which provides the international legal definition of a stateless persons and outlines the minimum standard of treatment to be enjoyed by individuals who meet this definition. This instrument also contains a provision obliging state parties to as far as possible facilitate