9 | PROTECTING STATELESS PERSONS FROM ARBITRARY DETENTION IN BULGARIA of such persons is generally subject to extensive delays and is often impossible. In many European countries, stateless persons detained for removal purposes are therefore vulnerable to prolonged and repeat detention. These factors in turn make stateless persons especially vulnerable to the negative impact of detention. The emotional and psychological stress of lengthy–even indefinite–periods of detention without hope of release or removal is particularly likely to affect stateless persons throughout Europe. It is evident that the failure of immigration regimes to comprehend and accommodate the phenomenon of statelessness, identify stateless persons and ensure that they do not directly or indirectly discriminate against them often results in stateless persons being punished for their statelessness. Thus, the European Network on Statelessness (ENS) has embarked on a two-year project aimed at better understanding the extent and consequences of the detention of stateless persons in Europe, and advocating for protecting stateless persons from arbitrary detention through the application of regional and international standards. Among the outputs of this project are: • A Regional Toolkit for Practitioners, on protecting stateless persons from arbitrary detention – which sets out regional and international standards which states are required to comply with and practitioners can draw on in their work;6 and • A series of country reports investigating the law, policy and practice related to the detention of stateless persons in selected European countries and its impact on stateless persons and those at risk of statelessness. These reports are meant as information resources but also as awareness raising and advocacy resources that we hope will contribute to strengthening protection frameworks in this regard. In year one of the project (2015), three such country reports have been published on Malta, the Netherlands and Poland.7 In year two, this report on Bulgaria and two others on the UK and Ukraine were published. 1.2 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES, METHODOLOGY AND LIMITATIONS The goals of this study are two-fold: i) filling an information gap on statelessness and detention in Bulgaria; and ii) to serve as an advocacy tool to promote greater protection for stateless persons and those at risk of statelessness from arbitrary detention, including through improved identification and determination of statelessness. To this end, the present first chapter provides an overview of the research objectives and introduces the reader to the Bulgarian context. The second chapter is concerned with law and policy, existing research and (statistical) data on statelessness and detention. Then, in chapter three, key issues of concern are identified. The report concludes with a summary of findings and recommendations for improvement. This study employs a varied methodology: it draws on extensive desk research and analysis, inter alia, on Bulgaria’s accession to the two UN Statelessness Conventions and the number of reservations made by the state; the study of the case law in which stateless applicants invoked the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (1954 Convention) in the absence of national implementing provisions; as well as a comparison with the ‘Hungarian practice’, which the Bulgarian draft law in the field declares to follow. The desk research takes into consideration a recently growing body of research in the field of immigration detention. The report is informed by the knowledge and experience of its author, an academic in the field of undocumented migrants and their access to fundamental human rights with a particular focus on detention, and a legal practitioner in Bulgaria with first hand insight on administrative practices and access to justice in Bulgaria, being the legal representative of stateless detainees in landmark cases cited in the report. The findings in this report are up-to-date as of September 2016. An important limitation in the desk research has been the lack of credible statistical data with regard to stateless persons (and persons at risk of statelessness) in detention. Upon detention in Bulgaria stateless persons are usually assigned to a country of origin that they are deemed to have come from or to have some cultural or historical link with. In the removal and detention orders stateless persons are routinely identified as citizens of those countries. Therefore, in the official statistics, there are very few persons who have been recorded as stateless or whose nationality is recorded to be ‘unknown’. Additional freedom of information requests to the Ministry of the Interior, the State Agency for Refugees (SAR), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice have been made, using suitable proxies that might be indicative of the issues studied. This report also draws on field research. Interviews were conducted with key stakeholders in Bulgaria as well as stateless persons and persons at risk of statelessness who either have been detained or are currently in detention. We also got access to and studied in detail the case files of (former) stateless detainees. Two of the case studies, of Mr. Auad and of Mr. Kadzoev, are based solely on the study of the former detainees’ files. The remaining cases are based both on interviews with the persons and study of their legal files. For some cases, we relied solely on the information provided through the interviews, which was not verifiable through documentary sources. A challenge and an obstacle has been the lack of recognition of the study topic as one of interest or