(or countries) in relation to which an individual’s allegation of a well-founded fear of persecution should be assessed”.xv 20. Moreover, “(A)n assessment of statelessness will be necessary where an individual seeks the application of the safeguards set out in the 1961 Convention”.xvi For example, it will facilitate the identification of situations in which the Contracting State must grant its nationality to a person born in its territory who would otherwise be stateless pursuant to Article 1 of that Convention. Lack of Statistical Data 21. In October 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published a ‘Scoping Paper: Statelessness in Ireland’xvii in which it attempted to set out the extent of statelessness in Ireland. However, as no reliable statistical information is available on the number of stateless persons, this proved a difficult exercise. In its paper, UNHCR highlighted that although it attempted to gather information on the number of stateless persons from various State agencies, including the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner (ORAC), the Refugee Appeals Tribunal (RAT) and the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB), the number of stateless persons within the refugee population is larger than recorded by those agencies. 22. Some case studies have been published by the ENS in an effort to illustrate the situation of stateless persons in Ireland and 10 other countries across the European continent: CASE STUDY 1: Andrej was born in Azerbaijan, then part of the USSR, and resided there until 1987 before moving to Lithuania, then also part of the USSR. When Lithuania became independent following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1992, he acquired Lithuanian citizenship. After Lithuania joined the EU in 2004, Andrej moved to Ireland as a Lithuanian citizen exercising freedom of movement and he has lived in Ireland ever since. However in February 2008, almost three years after his arrival in Ireland, Andrej received notification from the Lithuanian authorities that his citizenship had been unilaterally revoked on the ground that he had allegedly obtained citizenship of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Andrej first believed this to be simply an administrative error since he has never been a citizen of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and has no entitlement to such citizenship. However, his efforts to resolve the matter through the Lithuanian courts were unsuccessful. Ireland lacks a dedicated determination procedure but In April 2010 Andrej submitted an application for recognition as a stateless person to the Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service. This application remained pending for more than four years, but Andrej was granted permission to remain ‘on exceptional grounds’ in August 2011. It was only after his legal team threatened to bring legal proceedings against Ireland for failure to introduce a statelessness determination procedure, that Andrej finally received a ‘declaration of statelessness’ – one of only two ever issued by Ireland to date – in May 2014. The Irish Naturalisation and Immigration Service has since clarified that no further ‘Declarations of Statelessness’ will be issued. However, there are cases pending before the Irish High Court seeking to challenge this situation.xviii 7