stipulates everyone’s right to healthcare and States are under an obligation to respect this right by “refraining from denying or limiting equal access for all persons, including prisoners or detainees, minorities, asylum seekers and irregular migrants”. The right to the highest attainable standard of health also falls within other international human rights treaties. 4 It spans environmental determinants of health, standards of healthcare, and rights to privacy and medical confidentiality. The right to health is closely linked to the fulfilment of other rights, which stateless persons are often denied such as the right to education, social security, and food. According to the Committee on Economic and Social Rights, the right to healthcare is “indispensable for the exercise of other rights” 5 with universal application and with access to healthcare services ensured to every human being without regards to race, religion, or other criteria, including legal status (UNHCR, 2008; Rechel et al., 2013). The two most important international instruments addressing statelessness are the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which provides the definition of a stateless person and the international legal framework for the protection of stateless people, and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which sets rules around conferral and withdrawal of nationality. Whilst the 1954 Convention establishes the international legal definition of a “stateless person” it Situation assessment of statelessness, health, and COVID-19 in Europe does not prescribe a particular mechanism for determining statelessness. At the time of writing, 12 European States have established dedicated statelessness determination procedures in law to provide protection to stateless people under the 1954 Convention.6 In addition to the two statelessness-specific conventions, many other human rights treaties set standards for the protection of stateless people, avoidance of statelessness, and the right to a nationality. At regional level, the European Convention on Nationality and the Council of Europe Convention on the Avoidance of Statelessness in Relation to State Succession are two key instruments for the prevention of statelessness. In the UN framework, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women, amongst others, all contain provisions to guarantee the right to a nationality. Thus, all European States have obligations under international law towards stateless people and the eradication of statelessness, regardless of whether they are party to the core statelessness conventions.7 Statelessness in Europe8, as elsewhere, affects both migrants and refugees, and people who have lived in the same place for generations, but it remains a largely hidden phenomenon, due to the incompleteness and sparsity of data. Disaggregated data and data on stateless people held in immigration detention are particularly lacking (ENS, 2019). Many stateless people have never crossed borders and find themselves stateless in their “own country“ (referred to as “in situ stateless persons“). In the Balkans and countries of the former Soviet Union, many Roma and other minority groups remain stateless or at risk of statelessness because of discrimination and the legacy of state succession.9 Others find themselves stateless in a migratory context, for example, stateless refugees are among those seeking asylum in many European countries.10 Statelessness in Europe therefore disproportionately affects migrant, refugee, and minority groups, including Roma and ethnic Russians living in the successor states of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. UNHCR reported that there were 527,959 stateless persons in Europe in 2019, based on information provided by governments and other sources, although this is likely an underestimate.11 Statelessness prevents many of those affected from accessing fundamental rights (human, civil, social, cultural, and political) creating or exacerbating significant marginalisation and exclusion spanning access to healthcare, education, housing, employment, and other civil rights such as birth and marriage registration. Due to the lack of domestic legal frameworks to identify and solve statelessness, including mechanisms to determine who is stateless and due protection under the 1954 Convention, stateless people’s enjoyment of rights varies significantly from country 7