STATELESSNESS AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE EAST AFRICAN COMMUNITY to increase inclusion in the formal economy and access to benefits; but it will also reveal and perhaps exacerbate exclusion if care is not taken to avoid those effects. This is equally true in other countries where the requirements for identification are becoming more stringent. Thus, efforts to roll out universal requirements for identification should be paired with efforts to reduce statelessness, which requires as a first step legal and practical measures to reduce the number of people whose nationality is undocumented. When is lack of identity documentation evidence of statelessness?348 Lack of documentation is in part just one symptom of more general weaknesses in the state. A very large number of people in Partner States of the EAC have no documents because they don’t see the point of having documents, and because they are costly in time and money to obtain. The first point of need is often when a child should enter school or needs to take an exam, but if schools are inaccessible or of poor quality (either objectively or as a matter of opinion), then what need for birth registration? If you remain entirely in the informal sector, a peasant farmer or transhumant pastoralist, then identity documents are not required; if the police demand money when you cross a border or an internal checkpoint whether or not you have the right documents, then a passport or identity card does not serve even its most basic use of proving your right to be present or to travel. If, in addition, obtaining documentation requires a journey to the nearest administrative centre; a long wait to be seen; a mixture of official and unofficial fees, and at least a day’s lost income, the cost-benefit analysis looks untempting. It is not the case that all these people are necessarily stateless as a result: but those who are in this situation and are in addition members of a social group generally regarded as marginal – including those described in this study – are certainly at risk of statelessness. It is only in the effort of seeking documents that statelessness will become apparent. UNHCR has published a Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons which considers the definition of a stateless person.349 The definition in international law appears in Article 1(1) of the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, as follows: For the purpose of this Convention, the term “stateless person” means a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. In its guidelines on this definition, UNHCR notes that “establishing whether an individual is not considered as a national under the operation of its law […] is a mixed question of fact and law”, thus: [E]xamining an individual’s position in practice may lead to a different conclusion than one derived from a purely objective analysis of the application of nationality laws of a country to an individual’s case. A State may not in practice follow the letter of the law, even going so far as to ignore its substance. The reference to “law” in the definition of statelessness in Article 1(1) therefore covers situations where the written law is substantially modified when it comes to its implementation in practice.350 The guidelines go on to emphasise that in many states it is not one single authority that determines whether a person has the nationality of that state, but rather a combination of many different agencies responsible for issuing different documents and making different decisions for different purposes. It may therefore be a cumulative rejection of applications for documents rather than one single one that shows that a person is not regarded as a national. Where a person acquires nationality automatically, by operation of law – as is usually the case for attribution of nationality at birth (whether the nationality of the parents or of the state in which birth takes place) – documents are not usually issued at that time. But it is later, when documentary 348 Extracted from Bronwen Manby, Nationality, Migration and Statelessness in West Africa, UNHCR and IOM, June 2014. 349 UNHCR, Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons under the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, UNHCR, 2014. 350 Handbook, paragraph 24. UNHCR / September 2018 83