Breaking the Presumption Decision on refusal in recognition as a stateless person shall be made by the State Migration Service … if the applicant is a citizen of Ukraine or another State, provided that his/her citizenship was recognized by the competent authority of this State and the applicant was documented according to this State’s legislation. The law relies on the discretion of SDP authorities to suspend the process for the investigation or verification of whether the applicant is a citizen of Ukraine. The law does not establish a timeline for this investigation, nor for the suspension of the procedure. However, it states that, conditional on the outcome of such investigation, the SDP shall continue or end by filing the case. As in Georgia and Moldova, the applicant shall wait until the SDP ends, rejecting the statelessness status application, or rejecting the application because the applicant is entitled to Ukrainian citizenship, or recognize the statelessness status. In this matter, the closing or filing of the case requires a final decision from the SDP authority rejecting the application since the applicant is eligible for citizenship. VII COMMENTARY ON THE SAFEGUARDS AGAINST THE PRESUMPTION THAT SDP APPLICANTS ARE FOREIGN SDP laws, measures or norms are part of administrative law, and the judicial review of these procedures shall be part of due process. The possibility that the applicant of the SDP may be a national of the country in which they have applied for the procedure may arise during the registration, interview or analysis phases of the SDP. 94 The eight SDP systems discussed above do not establish which standard of evidence applies when there is suspicion or doubt that the applicant could be national of that state. However, as in RSD, the standard of evidence for SDP is shared between the authority and the applicant. It is enough for the standard of proof to be to a ‘reasonable degree’ 95 to determine that the applicant is stateless. 96 Therefore, the same standard of proof could be applicable to SDP norms, which have granted authorities discretion over the identification of nationals and the corresponding consultations with national civil registry systems. Nevertheless, consultations and inquiries to national civil registry systems should be considered good practice as long as the discretion to refer a case to these systems is not left to SDP authorities. Costa Rica and Panama, for example, have established a compulsory inquiry to the national civil registry system as part of their SDP. In this manner, the presumption that the applicant is foreign is questioned. These safeguards in SDP norms guarantee the right to nationality and expedite access to the civil registry system, rather than consigning applicants to face delays. Applicants who must wait until the end of the procedure (the final decision or resolution of the case) are left unprotected, as a result of the delays that occur in 94 95 96 The 23 SDP norms analysed for this article establish similar procedural phases to RSD: 1. application or registration; 2. interview; 3. analysis of the case; and 4. decision. ‘[S]tatelessness will not be established to a reasonable degree where the determination authority is able to point to clear evidence that the individual is a national of an identified State’. Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons (n 2) [89]–[93]. The majority of the 23 SDP norms examined for this article follow this standard of proof or standard of evidence. Despite some countries in Europe not expressly stating this standard in their SDP, it seems that, in practice, it is followed. However, the SDP adopted in the Americas expressly state the same standard of proof. See Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons (n 2) 34–35 [89]–[93]; Good Practice Paper 2020 (n 3) 16–18. 83