SOLVING STATELESSNESS cases on matters of service provision, for example. In order for this to benefit stateless people, lawyers need to bring these arguments before the courts. Given the unequivocal relevance of discrimination to the lived experience of stateless persons, these may prove powerful arguments. 4.1.2. Promoting equality in statelessness determination Stateless migrants often face complex and multiple forms of discrimination, both direct and indirect, in violation of State obligations under international (and often national) law. The obligation to protect stateless migrants from discrimination is impossible to achieve if States fail to identify stateless persons on their territory to begin with. Indeed, the UNHCR ‘Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons’ clarifies that the State duty to identify stateless persons in their territory is implicit in the 1954 Convention if the State is to “provide them appropriate treatment in order to comply with their Convention commitments”. The “hidden” nature of statelessness in migration contexts makes it easier to directly discriminate and more difficult to identify indirect discrimination against stateless persons. This discrimination plays out in all areas (education, access to livelihoods, etc.) but none more starkly and devastatingly than in the context of immigration detention. One of the paradoxes of the modern world is that as international travel and migration becomes more common, those who do not or cannot meet increasingly stringent entry and stay requirements are dealt with more harshly, often by detaining them while measures are taken to remove them to whence they came (or anywhere that will accept them). One of the implications of these inequalities is the growth of the immigration detention industry and with it the arbitrary and discriminatory detention of stateless persons. As stated by the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants: The immigration detention of stateless persons is one of the silent tragedies of our globalised world that plays out behind 62 63 closed doors, away from the gaze of the media, but UNHCR, Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons, 2014, para. 8. For more information on this area see, European Network on Statelessness, Protecting stateless persons from arbitrary detention: a regional toolkit for practitioners, 2015; and Equal Rights Trust, Guidelines to Protect Stateless Persons from Arbitrary detention, 2012. 121