Statelessness in Russia and Ukraine: Recurrent Problems and New Risks and Challenges “The right to nationality is often defined as the right to have rights. The right to nationality allows citizens to exercise their rights more fully and effectively than solely on the basis of international human rights norms. Nevertheless, citizenship is not a mandatory condition for the exercise of human rights. Under international law, stateless persons are also rightsholders. States must protect each person, including stateless persons, from human rights violations.” Statement by Thomas Hammarberg at the 4th Conference of the Council of Europe on Nationality, Strasbourg, December 17, 2010 At least 15 million people worldwide are not citizens or subjects of any country. However, the number of children being born into statelessness (up to 70,000 annually) exceeds the rate of decline in statelessness (according to worldwide UNHCR data for 2017, 56,500 stateless persons in 29 countries acquired citizenship).4 In recent history, one of the events that resulted in mass statelessness was the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Because former Soviet states took different approaches to the gain or loss of citizenship, and because of multiple defects and contradictions in the laws of these states, certain individuals and entire groups of people who never exchanged their Soviet passports for the passports of a newly formed state for one reason or another became vulnerable and, ultimately, stateless. Many former Soviet countries, including Russia and Ukraine, still lack an effective procedure to legalize stateless persons who, without valid identity documents, are not only deprived of access to realize their rights, but are also prosecuted for violating the migration laws of the countries where they are located. The majority of stateless persons have grounds for acquiring Russian or Ukrainian citizenship on the basis of their territorial origin, but the formalization or inaccessibility of the procedure for doing this and defects in the corresponding laws of both countries trap stateless persons in a legal impasse on their path to citizenship. For many people, the old Soviet passport is the sole document that many stateless people have. For example, in 2018 91 people with Soviet passports turned to the Right to Protection charitable foundation for help obtaining a Ukrainian passport. 4  An overview and analysis of global statistics by ISI. Statelessness in numbers: 2018. https://www.institutesi.org/ISI_statistics_analysis_2018.pdf 9