THE PROBLEM OF STATELESSNESS IN UKRAINE AND THE WAYS OF ADDRESSING IT II. Statelessness in Ukraine: general situation review The problem of statelessness is serious both on a global scale and within any given country, Ukraine being no exception. As estimated by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 1, 10 million people all over the world have currently no nationality and, hence, cannot expect protection from any country in the world and are not able to take full-fledged part in society and exercise the whole spectrum of human rights. Citizenship is described as a legal bond between a State and an individual whereas statelessness refers to the status of a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law 2. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to a nationality”. Within the mentioned context it is clear, that statelessness may be a problem resulting from the state policy as well as a subject to a person’s free will. So is statelessness a problem for Ukraine? And, if it is, what is its extent? Statistical data It should be noted that an exact scale of this problem in Ukraine is currently not known. Reasons for that will be given below. According to the All-Ukrainian Population Census of 2001, 83 thousand persons called themselves stateless. Another 40 thousand persons did not specify their citizenship at all during the same census. One can assume that those 40 thousand individuals could include both stateless persons and persons having ex-USSR citizen passports who could not identify their citizenship by themselves. On the other hand, some of those who identified themselves as Ukrainian citizens could actually be stateless persons. As this figure is based on self-identification as stateless and cannot be verified, it fails to illustrate the actual state of affairs. The lack of statistical data within studying the problem of statelessness in Ukraine is illustrated by the following statistics on acquisition of Ukrainian citizenship based on territorial origin by stateless persons. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, only 1,802 stateless persons were registered with the bodies of the Ministry of internal affairs as of 1 January 2005. 3,033 stateless persons were admitted to citizenship of Ukraine by territorial origin, and 5,249 acquired citizenship of Ukraine by territorial origin in 2004. During 2005, 4,658 1 UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), UNHCR Global Trends 2013: War’s Human Cost, 20 June 2014, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/53a3df694.html 2 See article 1 of the 1954 Convention relating to the status of stateless persons 6