BUILDING STATELESSNESS-SENSITIVE ID SYSTEMS 9 In Situ Statelessness: Most stateless persons have never crossed a border and find themselves in their ‘own country’. Their predicament exists in situ, that is, in the country of their long-term residence, in many cases the country of their birth. For these individuals, statelessness is often the result of problems in the framing and implementation of national laws. Legal Identity: The UN Legal Identity Agenda (UNLIA) defines legal identity as the basic characteristics of an individual’s identity, such as name, sex, place, and date of birth, conferred through birth registration and the issuance of a certificate by an authorized civil registration authority. If birth registration is unavailable, legal identity may be granted by a legally recognized identification authority, which should be linked to the civil registration system. Legal identity is retired upon death with the issuance of a death certificate by the civil registration authority (ID4D, Types of ID Systems).1 Refugee: The 1951 Convention defines a refugee as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution. Asylum Seeker: An asylum seeker is an individual who has left their country seeking protection from persecution and whose claim for refugee status has not yet been determined (UNHCR, Website: Asylum Seekers). Internally Displaced Person (IDP): An IDP is a person or a group of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border (OCHA: Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, 2024). Migrant: There is no internationally agreed definition of a migrant; for purposes of this publication migrants are persons living outside their country of birth, irrespective of: their migration status, the reasons for their migration, or how they migrated. Note: Refugees, IDPs, migrants, and asylum seekers can also be stateless, i.e., have a dual-status as stateless refugees or stateless migrants or stateless asylum-seekers, and displacement or migration can exacerbate risks of statelessness. 1 Although proof of legal identity—particularly birth and/or marriage registration—is frequently a requirement for acquiring a nationality, legal identification need not be linked to nationality and should not be equated with legal or national status. While some legal identification systems (e.g., national identification systems) require or constitute proof of nationality, others do not.