The adoption of this bill will be the key that gives stateless persons access to social and economic rights. The introduction of this procedure is also important in terms of state security because people who are currently in the country illegally will be identified and documented and will become visible for state monitoring. At the time of this writing, the bill was being considered by the Parliament. Its creation was necessitated by Ukraine’s accession to the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness in 2013. Ukraine does not currently have an effective procedure for identifying stateless persons, which is necessary for establishing identity and providing robust protection for stateless persons in the country, so a significant number of people living in Ukraine without documents cannot resolve this problem within the framework of existing laws. This refers not just to people who do not have grounds to acquire Ukrainian citizenship, but also to people whose countries of origin or whose parents’ countries of origin and/or nationality do not recognize as citizens. These people may live in Ukraine for years with no chance of obtaining an identity document or permit to live in the country legally. They remain invisible to the state and cannot exercise their rights to education and medical care, claim an inheritance, open a bank account, register a marriage, or cross the border freely. Below is a typical example of the legal morass in which stateless persons in Ukraine find themselves. Nina Islyamova was born in Kyrgyzstan, where her parents, who were ethnic Meskhetian Turks from Adjara, Georgia, were forcibly deported like many other members of Muslim minorities after the World War II. Nina spent her childhood and youth in Jalal-Abad, then she and her future husband (also a member of a repressed and deported people—the Crimean Tatars) moved to neighboring Uzbekistan, where they later married and had two children. Their peaceful life came to an abrupt halt when ethnic clashes started as the Soviet Union broke up. In the summer of 1991, Nina, her husband, and their two infants had to leave Uzbekistan. They returned to her husband’s historical homeland in Crimea, where they settled for good in Krasnoperekopsk. Over time, the children went to school and Nina worked hard where she could, mainly at the market (in the difficult post-Soviet times, it was hard to find official employment). When it came time to exchange her Soviet passport for a Ukrainian passport in 1998, Nina lost her Soviet passport, so she could not obtain a Ukrainian one. Even though she kept trying in subsequent years, she was not able to surmount the bureaucratic barriers. In the winter of 2014, Nina went to Kiev to obtain a certificate attesting to her lack of Uzbek citizenship, which was required for becoming a citizen 26