Stateless Indigenous People(s) 1 99 Introduction The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted in 2007 by the UN General Assembly, is very strict on many issues. Amongst them: equal treatment, ‘Indigenous peoples and individuals (…) have the right to be free from any kind of discrimination’.1 (Non-)discrimination is the noun most used in the Declaration (15 times), as a goal as such and as applied to a range of other substantive rights. For the present publication, Article 6 of the Declaration is also very relevant: ‘Every indigenous individual has the right to a nationality’.2 Taken together this sounds like a convincing and safe legal system for the approximately 5000 indigenous peoples worldwide as well as for their individual community members: if national legal systems meet these internationally recognized human rights standards, indigenous people(s) can claim equal treatment, and they can do so on the basis of a solid recognition of their right to a nationality, which as such can be seen as a ‘gateway’ to the recognition of a plurality of other rights.3 In publications on the history of the UNDRIP, the provisions on nondiscrimination and the right to a nationality have not been labeled as controversial.4 No State has claimed to be in favor of discrimination or has stated that some of its inhabitants should live their lives without a nationality or the proof thereof: an identity certificate like a passport. This should not come as a surprise, but it is only one side of the story. The other side is that in reality all over the world indigenous communities and individuals do not enjoy these rights and live in a legal vacuum. This problem is called ‘statelessness’. Because the topic of ‘indigenous people(s) and statelessness’ has not been given much attention so far, neither in academic literature nor in policy papers, and given the limited length of the present article, the authors have decided to refrain from tabling possible solutions, but to focus on a clarification of the problem (Part 2), and to highlight two selected issues related to the recognition of a nationality for indigenous people(s) (Part 3), followed by two concluding remarks (Part 4). 1 UNGA, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2 October 2007) UN Doc A/RES/61/295, Art 2. 2 Ibid, Article 6. 3 This matter will be discussed in more details in Part 3. 4 More controversial issues were: the (collective) rights to self-determination and to own and control lands, territories and resources. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 98-107