Confiscation of Passport 19 790 Total: 24. Being denied consular assistance and services results in individuals being denied access to other rights, including the right to birth registration,11 to obtain documents and to enter your own country.12 Those denied consular services do not have access to legal recourse due to a lack of due process standards. Statelessness among Syrian refugees 25. In 2017, UNHCR reported 117 stateless persons in Turkey. However, as a result of the Syrian Civil War, Turkey hosts approximately 3.6 million Syrians by May 2019,13 many of whom are at high risk of becoming stateless. According to the Turkish Parliament’s Refugee Subcommittee, there were around 311,000 children of Syrian origin who had been born stateless in Turkey by 2018.14 As Turkey does not currently provide these children unconditional birth-right citizenship, these children face denial of their right to acquire a nationality and risk being made stateless. 26. In 2014 Turkey passed a new law - the Regulation on Temporary Protection - applying exclusively to Syrian refugees, and providing them with temporary status and protection. Under this law, time spent in Turkey under temporary protection may not be interpreted to count towards the fulfilment of the requirement of five years’ uninterrupted legal residence as a precondition for applications for Turkish citizenship by naturalisation.15 27. Discriminatory nationality legislation in Syria, which does not guarantee women the right to transmit their Syrian nationality to their children; the loss of documentation due to the Syrian conflict; and the lack of birth-right citizenship in Turkey all combine to deny children’s right to a nationality and create the risk of statelessness for children born to Syrian refugees in Turkey. 28. Article 8 (1) of the Turkish Citizenship Law entitles children born in Turkey that are unable to acquire citizenship from the mother or father, to acquire Turkish citizenship at birth. However, in practice the law has not be applied adequately to Syrian children who were born in Turkey. The Turkish Minister of Interior stated in January 2019 that there were 53,099 naturalised Syrians in Turkey, including persons who arrived on residence permits prior to 2011. This figure rose to 79,894 as of March 2019.16 29. Children born to Syrian refugees face a heightened risk of lifetime statelessness particularly where procedural safeguards to identify and determine statelessness and related barriers to removal are not sufficient. It must be noted in this regard that every 11 See CRC Article 7.1. See ICCPR Article 12.4. 13 https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria/location/113 14 See for example: https://www.refugeenewsturkey.org/single-post/2018/03/09/More-than-300k%E2%80%98stateless%E2%80%99-Syrian-babies-born-in-Turkey-should-be-granted-citizenshipimmediately%E2%80%9D 15 https://www.asylumineurope.org/reports/country/turkey/naturalisation-0 Art 11 (1) (b) of the Turkish Citizenship Law No. 5901 (12/6/2009). 16 Mülteciler Derneği, ‘Türkiyedeki Suriyeli Sayısı Mart 2019’, 28 March 2019, available in Turkish at: https://bit.ly/2FycEVd. 12 6