Statelessness Working Paper Series 2016/03 1. Introduction Researching statelessness necessarily implies analysing, comparing and questioning various types of nationality/citizenship law. In Western European countries, the model of the ‘Nation-State’, where the concept of ‘nation’ as a cultural and ethnic entity coincides with the concept of ‘state’ as a political and geopolitical entity within the same borders, prevails. In contrast, the Western Balkan countries3 (WBC) are often ‘multinational states’, where some ‘nations’ or ‘national minorities’ may have special ties with a neighbouring state. In the best-case scenario, individuals belonging to national minorities have dual citizenship.4 Things get more complicated when we consider cases of ‘transnational’ or ‘transborder’ minorities.5 Some Romani individuals are in this situation, with the consequence among others of not having a clear legal status, and in the worst case, no access to citizenship. Being in a situation of statelessness or at risk of being stateless, they are deprived of basic rights such as access to education, health and social services, labour market, free movement, participation in political life, etc. Although truly reliable statistics on stateless people as well as on Roma are very difficult to obtain, within the European Union (EU), the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) estimates that there are around 400,000 stateless people,6 mainly as a consequence of the dissolution of the Soviet Union (Latvia and Estonia) but also resulting from migration. In the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, there are about 17,000 stateless people, mainly belonging to Romani communities. 7 Slovenia and Croatia have already joined the EU and the other WBC are potential candidates and were promised the prospect of joining when they are ready.8 That is why stateless individuals, undocumented citizens and legally invisible people from these countries are all potential future EU citizens, and it is in the EU’s best interest to foster the search for statelessness reduction, including in the WBC. Taking the example of Europe’s Roma, who consider themselves as a nation but do not have a national homeland, this short-paper intends to examine the evolution of the concept of EU citizenship in order to determine whether stateless individuals could access it without necessarily being nationals of an EU member state (MS). 2. The ‘Romani nation’: a stateless nation? Since they left northern India around the 10th century, the Romani people have never built any homeland, nor claimed a territory.9 Yet, centuries of persecution, slavery and the experience of the Romani Holocaust during the Second World War have contributed to the emergence of a feeling of nationhood. 10 What some authors call ‘Romani nationalism’ is however fragmented: throughout 3 ‘Western Balkans’, according to the European Union, refers to the former Yugoslavia successor states (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia) plus Albania. Nevertheless, the phrase chosen can vary from one international organisation to another: OSCE speaks about the ‘Balkans’ while UNHCR and CoE generally use ‘South-Eastern Europe countries’. 4 Aleksandar Pavković, The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism in a multinational state, St Martin's Press, New York, 1997 and Aleksandar Pavković, The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans, MacMillan, 2010 5 Some authors like Stefan Wolff speak of ‘minority with no compact territory’, or even ‘non-state people’. See Stefan Wolff, ‘The relationships between states and non-state peoples: a comparative view of the Kurds in Iraq’, in Gareth Stansfield & Robert Lowe (eds), Kurdish Policy Imperative, Chatham House, 2010 6 UNHCR, Global Trends 2012: Persons under UNHCR’s statelessness mandate, Table 7 <www.unhcr.org/globaltrends/2012GlobalTrends_0913.zip> accessed 1st March 2016 7 UNHCR Global Appeal 2015, South Eastern Europe, p2 <www.unhcr.org/5461e60d14a.html> accessed 1st March 2016 8 See the European Commission website ‘Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations’ <http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/countries/check-current-status/index_en.htm> accessed 1st March 2016 9 Jean-Pierre Liégeois, Roms en Europe, Council of Europe, 2007, p15 10 Genocide crimes perpetrated by the Germans and their Axis allies against the Roma are called Porajmos or Samudaripen. An estimated 220,000 to 500,000 Roma were killed (at least one quarter of the Romani population in Europe at the time). See more in Ian Hancock, ‘True Romanies and the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation and an overview’, in The Historiography of the Holocaust, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp 383–396 1