THE PROBLEM OF STATELESSNESS IN UKRAINE AND THE WAYS OF ADDRESSING IT
for private business; 1,171 persons for study; 407 persons for employment; and
1,757 persons for permanent residence. The figure seems to be large but, if
compared with the total number of persons having entered Ukraine during that
period, it becomes clear that the statistics on stateless persons crossing the
Ukrainian border are not high. Many stateless persons are currently refused
entry. For example, according to the statistics provided by the Administration of
the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine for seven months of 2013, officials at
Zhuliany and Boryspil air communication crossing points refused entry to 749
persons overall, including 37 stateless persons and 17 Syrians among which
there could also be stateless persons with Syrian refugee cards. As of October
2014 6,561 stateless persons live in the territory of Ukraine with permanent
residence permits or temporary residence permits.
It is worth emphasizing that the above-stated figures fail to reflect a real picture
concerning the number of stateless persons in Ukraine because of a number of
reasons – both practical, such as absence of automated systems at checkpoints
on the state border of Ukraine in the first years of independence, and procedural
ones, for example, during the above-mentioned period there was no census of
the stateless persons leaving Ukraine. This figure is not precise also, because if
the relevant bodies did hold the mentioned census, it was only for the persons
recognized as stateless persons, whereas the stateless persons who were not
documented as such, the persons with uncertain nationality and the persons at
risk of statelessness were not taken into account. Besides, one should assume
that a certain number of persons could cross the border outside the official
checkpoints, which made including them in general statistics impossible.
A specific category of stateless persons who immigrated to Ukraine consists of
stateless persons of Palestinian origin. Migrants of Palestinian origin enter the
territory of Ukraine both from the Occupied Palestinian Territories and from the
states issuing Palestinian refugee travel documents – Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt.
The governmental bodies of the Palestinian Authority issue travel documents
specifying Palestinian citizenship. Thus, the stateless persons of Palestinian
origin can be categorized in the following groups:
1)Persons arriving from the Occupied Palestinian Territories;
2)Palestinian refugees, i.e. persons and their descendants whose normal place
of residence was Palestine during the period between June 1946 and May 1948
or in June 1967, and who, after flight from war to other states, lost their right to
return and live in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a result of the 1948 ArabIsraeli conflict, according to the legislative restrictions imposed by the Israeli
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