Nationality: Romani; Citizenship: European Maylis de Verneuil Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2016/03 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion June 2016 Author biography Maylis de Verneuil is a French-trained attorney who has been working for the past ten years on humanitarian missions. She recently received her PhD in Human Rights from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa) with a thesis entitled “Statelessness of Romani Individuals in the Western Balkans: Negligence or Discrimination?” Author email mdeverneuil@yahoo.fr Keywords Romani nationalism – stateless nation – EU citizenship – EU law – CJEU jurisprudence Abstract Among the approximate ten million stateless people worldwide, UNHCR estimates that more than 680,000 live in (geographical) Europe.1 In the Western Balkans, the majority of stateless people are members of the Romani community, mainly as a consequence of discrimination.2 Since the Roma, who are the largest minority in Europe with about twelve million people, constitute a non-territorial transborder minority, some proposals have been expressed to confer them a status of ‘stateless nation’. In the current context of developments concerning the meaning and content of EU citizenship, it has even been proposed that this Romani nationality be included within the European Union system and confer EU citizenship, without being necessarily attached to the nationality of a member state. If this idea may appear fanciful and unrealistic for the time being, it has the merit to raise interesting questions concerning the EU’s role and powers to end statelessness. 1 See UNHCR website <www.unhcr.org/pages/4e12db4a6.html> accessed 1st March 2016. See also the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI), The World’ Stateless, Oisterwijk, Netherlands, December 2014, p95 2 See notably Julija Sardelic, ‘Romani Minorities and Uneven Citizenship Access in the Post-Yugoslav Space’, in Ethnopolitics, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2015