4 1. EUROPE’S #STATELESSKIDS IS CHILDHOOD STATELESSNESS A REAL PROBLEM? Based on data relating to five of the largest statelessness situations in the world, where there are no measures in place to ensure that children do not inherit their parents’ plight, UNHCR estimates that globally, a baby is born stateless every 10 minutes.14 In Europe however, new cases of childhood statelessness are emerging at a far lower rate than this, since statelessness exists on a smaller scale and partial or full safeguards in place in most countries in the region are helping to prevent the inheritance or emergence of statelessness. Nevertheless, as will be explained in this report, new cases of childhood statelessness do continue to arise in all sorts of different circumstances in Europe too. Whether it affects a few dozen or several thousand people in any given European country, the impact on the individual must not be ignored. For a child, the inability to secure any nationality can have severely detrimental consequences and amounts to a violation of his or her right to a nationality as protected by international human rights law. HOW MANY CHILDREN ARE STATELESS IN EUROPE TODAY? This is a question to which no-one, regrettably, has a firm answer. Statistics on statelessness are notoriously hard to come by15 and across Europe, there is a scarcity of reliable – or indeed any – statistics on the number of stateless children. Where some data is available on the number of persons affected by statelessness, this is often not disaggregated by age, so it is impossible to distil how many among them are children.16 Of the eight country studies on childhood statelessness carried out by ENS during 2015, only two were able to report that the government maintained relatively comprehensive figures of the number of children affected.17 The lack of adequate data on the scale of childhood statelessness in Europe is serving to further compound the problem by reducing its visibility and impairing stakeholders’ ability to take necessary action. The need for improved data on children’s access to nationality, as well as on the scale and impact of childhood statelessness, is an area of engagement that must be further prioritised.18 To achieve this means, among others, encouraging relevant government bodies “to review which of their data collection systems capture data relating to childhood statelessness – including on birth registration rates – and make improvements, as necessary to the data collection methods concerned”, as well as making better use of “such frameworks as the state party reporting to the Committee on the Rights of the Child and other human rights bodies, as well as mechanisms within the EU framework, to promote systematic generation and dissemination of reliable data on children’s access to nationality”.19 UNHCR estimates that globally, A BABY IS BORN STATELESS EVERY 10 MINUTES OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES In the rest of Europe it is also very difficult to pinpoint how many children are affected by statelessness. What data there is confirms that childhood statelessness is a challenge shared by countries throughout Europe, but there are considerable variations in the apparent scale of the issue, making it difficult to extrapolate towards any general trends. In Sweden, for instance, the statistics bureau’s data for 2014 shows a total of 8,974 children listed as stateless – suggesting that this country hosts one of the largest numbers of stateless children in Europe.26 In Iceland, on the other hand, only 32 children are listed as stateless in the national population register.27 In several countries, the scale of the problem is obscured behind registration practices that fail to clearly differentiate between stateless children and those of “unknown nationality”, many of whom may actually also be stateless but not identified as such.28 In Germany, where stateless and “unknown nationality” are not separated in published population statistics, there are over 9,000 people in this category under the age of 20, suggesting that there are a considerable number of stateless children in the country.29 In the Netherlands, more than 800 children who were born in the country are recorded in the population registration system as stateless but there is an even larger population of children of “unknown nationality”.30 In Hungary, over 200 children each year have their nationality registered as “unknown” when their birth is recorded.31 Elsewhere, only a partial picture of the scale of the problem can also be constructed from related data. For instance, in Poland, 35 stateless children lodged asylum applications between 2004 and 2014; while 71 stateless children acquired Polish nationality in the same period.32 And in the United Kingdom, over the space of a decade (from 2001-2010), some 350 stateless children received British nationality through one of several different routes.33