Legal briefing: Statelessness and the right to respect for private and family life October 2024 requirement had been imposed that the applicant was unable to fulfil by virtue of their statelessness.65 A State’s failure to regularise a person’s residence status may hamper their prospects of employment and the ability to secure and access health care or health insurance.66 As such, the ECtHR has found that the inability of stateless persons to regularise their status may prevent them from leading a normal private life and therefore amount to an interference with the right for respect for private and family life.67 The Court found that Croatia and Hungary failed to comply with their positive obligation to provide an effective and accessible procedure or a combination of procedures enabling the applicants to have the issues of their further stay and status determined, amounting to a violation of the right to respect for private and family life under Article 8 ECHR. Eight applicants, some of whom were stateless and others were nationals of former Yugoslavia, failed to request Slovenian citizenship within the six months’ deadline provided for permanent residents to apply for citizenship following Slovenia’s independence. Two months after the deadline, their names were erased from the Register of Permanent Residents, resulting in them becoming stateless together with approximately 25,671 other people in Slovenia, who became known as “the erased”. The Court held that the domestic legal system had failed to clearly regulate the consequences of the “erasure”, resulting in a violation of Articles 8(2), 13, and 14 ECHR. In Kurić and Others v. Slovenia,68 the Court held that the domestic legal system had failed to clearly regulate the consequences of the “erasure” of the applicants from the Slovenian register. The Court held that the applicants some of whom were stateless and did not have any Slovenian identity documents were “left for several years in a state of legal limbo, and therefore in a situation of vulnerability and legal insecurity”.69 The Court also held that even in circumstances where there exists a procedure for stateless persons to regularise their status, Article 8(2) requires that this procedure must be sufficiently foreseeable and accessible to the person concerned.70 In this case, the applicants could not expect that their status would become irregular following their ‘erasure’ and that regularisation through the subsequent Legal Status Act was found not to be expansive enough. The Court has further noted that persons who cannot access routes to regularisation are subject to continuous violations under the Convention. As such, the four-month time limit to apply to the European Court of Human Rights (at the time of the Kurić judgment, this time limit was six months) does not apply 65 ECtHR, Hoti v. Croatia (application no. 63311/14), 26 July 2018, paragraphs 126, 128, 136-137; ECtHR, Sudita Keita v. Hungary (application no. 42321/15), 13 May 2020, paragraphs 35, 39. 66 ECtHR, Hoti v. Croatia (application no. 63311/14), 26 July 2018, paragraph 126; ECtHR, Sudita Keita v. Hungary (application no. 42321/15), 13 May 2020, paragraph 34. 67 ECtHR, Hoti v. Croatia (application no. 63311/14), 26 July 2018, paragraphs 126, 141; ECtHR, Sudita Keita v. Hungary (application no. 42321/15), 13 May 2020, paragraph 41. 68 ECtHR, Kurić and others v. Slovenia (application no. 26828/06), 26 May 2012. 69 ECtHR, Kurić and others v. Slovenia (application no. 26828/06), 26 June 2012, paragraph 302. 70 ECtHR, Kurić and others v. Slovenia (application no. 26828/06), 26 June 2012, paragraphs 343, 348-349. 15