336 R. Vecellio Segate 2014, §21) increasingly hold that at least some of these obligations extend well beyond the formal IHL remit, as to encompass for instance hybrid domestic conflicts as well – which are more and more common. Meanwhile, on the technical side, outlining the legal demarcation between statelessness and other more commonly known forms of “borderline citizenship” will hopefully clarify how technical standards should be designed to accommodate this phenomenon. To begin with, any system should incorporate a function to ask these individuals whether they would like their identity to be recorded: while they have the right to apply for an identity to be recognised by the relevant State, no obligation is bestowed upon them to do so. Stretching the argument formalistically, the State might still decide to somehow record the existence of such individuals and to do so, they will need to identify them in some way, but said identification does not need to be undersigned or “accepted” by stateless persons. This distinction is sophisticated but not merely formalistic: it might matter for instance towards one’s degree of civil or even criminal liability in the courtroom. Whether bilateral or not, data gathering should take place at least in an aggregate form, in order for the phenomenon to be statically assessed more accurately. As of today, no statistics seem fully reliable, because they are either based on voluntary self-disclosure, or based on incomplete primary data such as birth registries in the “Global South”. Also drawing on recommendations from the EGRIS Technical Progress Report submitted to the Fifty-third meeting of the UN Statistical Commission, more work is warranted towards demographic modelling and statistic data linkages, and the scientific capture of their sociolegal implications (Strode and Khanna 2021). A cloud-based open registry, possibly in the form of a blockchain (Gstrein and Kochenov 2020; Hobson et al. 2023), should be established and entrusted to an independent organisation, possibly funded by wealthy diaspora networks as opposed to reliant on voluntary state contributions, to be placed under the nominal authority of a specialised IO. Because States are active producers of statelessness and their bureaucratic apparatuses cannot necessarily be trusted, the registry should be accessible to them but entries should be modifiable by stateless individuals themselves only, in such a way that while voluntary statelessness might fall off-radar, most involuntary one is consistently recorded and each case can be brought to the attention of a selected group of States to be selected upon predefined criteria. To break the intergenerational cycle of poverty and misery rooted in statelessness, special focus is called upon recording new births whenever feasible (Human Rights Council 2014, §9–70; OSCE 2017, 31; 51): no matter the parents’ legal status, and possibly irrespective of the latter’s consent, newborns are to be provided with identity and citizenship as soon as possible – well-founded parental concerns around security (to be judicially appraised) representing the only exception.