Rethinking the Advocacy Tools of the EU in Exporting Legal Principles to the MENAT Region to Tackle Childhood Statelessness Katalin Berényi Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2016/05 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion December 2016 Author biography Katalin Berényi is a Hungarian PhD candidate at the University of Szeged with a focus on statelessness in the area of freedom, security and justice. Having previously worked as a migration expert of the Hungarian National Contact Point of the European Migration Network, she developed both professional and academic interest in the complex issue of statelessness. She continued to pursue her career in human rights diplomacy, currently working at the Permanent Mission of Hungary to the United Nations Office in Geneva. Author email katalin.berenyi@mfa.gov.hu; berenyikatalin@hotmail.com Key words childhood statelessness – EU legal principles – EEAS – external action on human rights – equal nationality rights – MENA Abstract This paper by Katalin Berényi reflects on the understudied yet pressing issue of the potential advocacy tools of the EU in reducing childhood statelessness beyond its borders, with a special focus on Syria and those MENAT countries that host and/or produce stateless populations having emerged due to biased nationality laws and deficient civil registration practices. Even though statelessness is not yet an explicit priority area of EU external human rights action, the article argues that the EU has the potential to pursue more ambitious foreign policy endeavors towards MENAT countries. By integrating the promotion of EU legal principles, such as gender equality translating into equal nationality rights in the context of the MENAT region, into its external engagements with these countries, there is further scope for the EU to mainstream the rights of stateless persons and those at risk of statelessness. Thereby, the EU could assume a crucial rule also in facilitating the long-term readmission and reintegration of Syrian ‘non-nationals’ in post-war Syrian society. The paper concludes that the EU disposes of the necessary tools, negotiating and influencing power to address statelessness in its foreign policy both at the bilateral and multilateral level, especially in the UN context and through its policy framework which is currently under development raising issues of statelessness with third countries beyond the already existing legal, quasi-legal and policy instruments.