What does the position of Roma in Europe indicate about minority statelessness? Julija Sardelić, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Leuven, Belgium Introduction The 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons defines a stateless person as an individual “who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law” (1954 Convention). According to UNHCR data, there are approximately 10 million people around the globe who fall under this definition (UNHCR 2018) due to reasons such as: “conflicts of laws, discrimination, “75 % of stateless people state succession, the legacy of colonization, arbitrary deprivation of nationality, administrative bararound the globe belong riers and lack of documentation, inheritance of to minorities” statelessness” (Institute for Statelessness and Inclusion, 2018). In 2017, UNHCR published a report according to which 75 % of stateless people around the globe belong to minorities (UNHCR 2017). This report also showed a recognition by UNHCR that the 1954 Convention was a product of its time. It addressed the challenges the world was facing due to the Second World War (WWII): the time when millions of refugees were wandering around Europe without any state to claim them as citizens, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt (1968). Since WWII, the geopolitical landscape has changed massively and it is not only those individuals falling under the 1954 Convention’s definition of statelessness who experience the “abstract nakedness of being nothing but a human” (Arendt 1968: 299-300). It also extends to the people who under the operation of state’s law were supposed be granted the protection of citizenship, yet they are unable to access it. As I argued in my previous work (Sardelić 2015), de facto stateless individuals find themselves in a legal limbo not protected by their own states, but also not falling under the protection of the 1954 Convention. UNHCR is increasingly recognizing this fact by including the position of Roma who have hindered access to citizenship as a part of its mission. As the 2011 UNHCR report on Statelessness in Southeast Europe showed, many more individuals do not in a strict sense fall into the category of de jure statelessness but are at “risk of becoming stateless” (UNHCR 2011). Yet at the same time they have more hindered access to basic human rights than those who were recognized as stateless (Swider 2018, Blitz 2018). This paper contextualizes the position of Roma who face statelessness with other occurrences of minority statelessness in Europe, and also draws examples from around the globe. It uses a socio-legal analysis to show that different domestic laws, as well as international conventions, can create difhttp://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 12