A/HRC/60/42 protection and solidarity. He stressed the importance of international cooperation in providing refuge and recognition to stateless persons. 13. Bronwen Manby, a lecturer at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Africa Coordinator for the Global Citizenship Observatory of the European University Institute in Florence, opened by stressing the importance of the right to nationality, enshrined in article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which asserted that everyone has the right to a nationality and that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his or her nationality. That right served as a foundation for accessing all other human rights. A stateless person, as defined in the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, was someone not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. Identifying such individuals involved complex legal and factual analysis, as outlined in the UNHCR handbook on protection of stateless persons. 14. Ms. Manby expressed concern that, despite its universality and its inclusion in various international and regional human rights instruments, discrimination on the grounds of sex, race, ethnicity, religion and other factors in nationality laws and procedures continued to be the basis for the denial of the right of nationality for millions of individuals across the globe. Although 90 per cent of countries did not have explicit discriminatory provisions in their nationality laws, 10 per cent still did, with a higher prevalence of such provisions in regions such as Africa and Asia. Ms. Manby underscored in particular that in 24 countries, women did not have the same right as men to confer nationality. She also pointed out forms of exclusion based on race, ethnicity or religion in countries such as Brunei Darussalam, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Uganda. Discrimination might be codified in laws or manifested in procedures that disproportionately affected marginalized communities. Nationality regimes were often complex, involving civil registration, family law and administrative procedures that could inadvertently lead to statelessness. In post-colonial contexts, arbitrary borders that had been drawn without regard to ethnic or cultural realities had further exacerbated statelessness, particularly in Africa. Ms. Manby drew attention to the heightened risks faced by migrants, nomadic populations and vulnerable children who might inherit statelessness from their parents. Discriminatory laws not only led to statelessness, but also caused violations of other human rights, including freedom of movement, political participation and access to education, healthcare and work. Ms. Manby concluded by emphasizing the grave impact of statelessness on human dignity, noting that denial of nationality often served as a precursor to conflict and instability. 15. Subin Mulmi, a human rights lawyer and researcher and the executive director of the Nepal-based non-governmental organization (NGO) Nationality For All, began by giving an overview of statelessness in the Asia and the Pacific. He noted with concern that, as of the end of 2023, the region was hosting an estimated 2.5 million stateless persons, nearly 50 per cent of the global total, according to the UNHCR global trends report. However, that figure was likely a significant undercount due to weak national identification systems, political sensitivities in reporting statelessness figures, and the legal invisibility of stateless populations. 16. Mr. Mulmi noted that most countries in the region followed a jus sanguinis (descent-based) model of citizenship acquisition. A total of 22 countries in the region allowed children to acquire citizenship from a parent regardless of birthplace and 17 countries imposed birthplace-based distinctions. Four countries – Brunei Darussalam, Kiribati, Malaysia and Nepal – retained gender-discriminatory laws that inhibited women’s ability to pass nationality to their children on the same terms as men. Nine countries restricted the ability of married women’ to confer their nationality on their foreign spouses. Those laws disproportionately disadvantaged women, thus reinforcing unequal citizenship rights across generations. Mr. Mulmi illustrated, through country examples, how ethnic and gender discrimination intersected. In Myanmar, citizenship was denied to members of groups that were not listed among the 135 officially recognized “national races”, leading to the exclusion of the Rohingya. In Brunei Darussalam, nationality was limited to the “Indigenous Malay race”, thereby excluding various ethnic groups and compounding ethnic and gender discrimination. In Nepal, children born to Nepali mothers and foreign fathers did not have equal access to nationality. In Malaysia, a recent constitutional amendment allowing women 4 GE.25-10379