ferent scales of legal realities surrounding the phenomenon of statelessness. The question that the paper aims to answer is whether there are any particular features of minority statelessness and whether/how is the statelessness that Romani minorities experience distinguishable from that which others experience? Complex Realities of Minority Statelessness in Europe and Beyond In Europe, the largest number of recognized stateless minorities belongs to Russian speakers in two Post-Soviet Baltic countries, Latvia and Estonia. From around 600,000 recognized stateless people in Europe 240,000 are located in Latvia and 85,000 in Estonia (Minority Rights International 2017). In the Soviet period, there was a statesponsored policy that encouraged Russian speakers to (then internally) migrate to the two Baltic countries in question. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Latvian and Estonian states adopted citizenship policies and law that stated that they did not become independent states in 1991 (no state succession) but, instead, ended an occupation of the Soviet Union. Russian speakers were perceived as a part of the former dominant majority who ended up in Latvia and Estonia as a part of the occupation plan. Only those residents of Latvia and Estonia who were either born there before 16/17 June, 1940 or were their descendants, became citizens of the two respective countries (Kuczyńska-Zonik 2017). Most Russian speakers, who had settled there after these dates, had to go through the process of naturalization, which included a citizenship test and majority language proficiency. Therefore, a great number of them remained stateless. Yet, as a number of scholars have argued (Kuczyńska-Zonik 2017, Swider 2018), their position does not resemble what Hannah Arendt described as statelessness; that is, a situation where a person lacks “the right to have rights”. While it is clear that they are stripped of political rights and face discrimination, they still enjoy a number of social, economic and cultural rights that extend beyond the scope provided in the 1954 Convention (Swider 2018). Since they have a broad scope of human rights already protected (for example, they also have a right to a non-citizen or alien’s passport) and also some additional rights (no visa requirements for Russia nor the EU), there is low interest to become naturalized Estonian or Latvian citizens, especially among the older generations (Kuczyńska-Zonik 2017). The position of the Russian speaking non-citizens of Latvia and Estonia is a very well documented case of minority statelessness in Europe. It shows that despite being perceived as the Other in one’s own country (Mole 2012), these non-citizen groups do enjoy a level of protection that many stateless people around the world do not. Yet this is only one side of the coin about minority statelessness in Europe. The other side shows a much less clear, and nonetheless bleaker, picture of marginalized minorities and forced migrants who are vulnerable to statelessness. Besides Roma, who have been in Europe for centuries, there are other new cases of possible minority statelesshttp://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 13