IMP LEMENTATIO N to acquisition of citizenship. Some aspects of paralegals’ work in such programs include: •W  orking with consular authorities of the country of origin and/or UNHCR, or border commissions. RELATED RESOURCE • Good practices paper— Action 2: Ensuring that no child is born stateless, UNHCR • Good practices paper— Action 7: Ensure birth registration for the prevention of statelessness, UNHCR • Child Protection Issue Brief: Birth Registration, UNHCR • Birth Registration: Right from the Start, UNICEF • A Passport to protection: A guide to birth registration programming, UNICEF • Strengthening civil registration and vital statistics for births, deaths and causes of death: Resource kit, World Health Organization. • Birth Registration in Emergencies Toolkit, Plan International • Update on marriage registration for refugees from Syria, NRC • Securing Status: Syrian refugees and the documentation of legal status, identity, and family relationships in Jordan, Norwegian Refugee Council and the International Human Rights Clinic, Harvard Law School 104 | •P  roof of nationality is often a prerequisite to obtaining protections in the country of residence, and many countries do not accept consular cards as proof. If only a judge in the country of origin can issue a nationality certificate, clients may have little opportunity to gain such certificates. •F  or stateless refugees, accessing protections for refugees is critical. Most countries have more developed protections for asylum seekers than for stateless persons. Further, international law protects refugees from forced return and contains protection against refoulement, which is essential. •L  ack of nationality may complicate asylum claims. Paralegals should help asylum seekers who are also stateless to have the state of residence recognize their statelessness. If their asylum claim fails, statelessness status may offer other protections. •M  any states have no official procedure for confirming statelessness and will only respond to correspondence from another state. •D  edicated statelessness determination procedures may result in a protective legal status of stateless person and put individuals on a pathway to citizenship. However, other procedures may only confirm statelessness, grant a few core rights, and leave the individual without a path to naturalization, despite international principles that states should help stateless people to become naturalized. Protecting socio-economic rights Sometimes it may be more effective for projects to focus on undocumented and under-documented persons’ socio-economic rights, such as access to schooling, before working on recognition of their citizenship. This might happen in contexts where nationality and identity are contested issues and systemic discrimination is driving differences in access to legal identity documents, but education is open to those without such documents. Open-ended interviews and focus groups may be a key way to explore a wide range of health, education, livelihood, and related issues. Sometimes individuals prefer to remain undocumented, for example if the only documentation available to them would enshrine a status that they don’t want, such as an ID card stating the holder is a foreigner. Focusing on socio-economic rights prior to legal and citizenship status may produce quicker results and create space for more constructive relations with government actors on less politically sensitive topics than citizenship (such as school drop-out rates or population healthcare status). Improving access to services may in turn increase community demand for access to legal identity documentation. A C O M M U N I T Y- B A S E D P R A C T I T I O N E R ’ S G U I D E : D O C U M E N T I N G C I T I Z E N S H I P A N D OT H E R F O R M S O F L E G A L I D E N T I T Y