EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. The Netherlands is a Contracting State to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. These treaties entered into force in the Netherlands on 11 April 1962 and 11 August 1985 respectively. 2. In the Netherlands, there is no dedicated and accessible procedure to determine whether someone is stateless as defined in the 1954 Convention (and general international law), that is, whether they are someone who is “not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”. The lack of such a procedure with a binding outcome for all authorities prevents the identification of individuals who are stateless and a more accurate estimate of the number and profile of stateless people in the Netherlands.. 3. In collecting data on the number of stateless people residing on Dutch territory, the Central Statistical Bureau (CBS) relies on registration practice at the municipal level in the records of the Municipal Basic Administration (GBA). Whenever someone’s nationality status cannot be readily determined upon registration with the GBA, the individual is registered in the CBS as being of unknown nationality. People are rarely registered as “stateless” in the GBA, as documentary evidence of statelessness for registration as such is required by law. Given that stateless people generally have no country willing or able to issue such documentation, it is often impossible for them to fulfil this condition. Consequently, the category “nationality unknown” is used significantly more frequently than the category “stateless” in the Municipal Basic Administration records and therefore also in the CBS statistics. 4. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) commissioned this study on statelessness in the Netherlands on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Convention. First, it describes the current Dutch practice of determining statelessness at the municipal level; it investigates the effects of registration as “nationality unknown” or as “stateless”; and it assesses the consequences of the absence of a dedicated statelessness determination procedure. Secondly, the socio-demographic analysis in this report aims to provide the issue of statelessness in the Netherlands with a human face. For this purpose, quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analysed and numerous interviews were conducted with stateless people and people of uncertain nationality residing in the Netherlands. 5. In order to address statelessness, UNHCR generally aims for improvements in four specific areas: the identification, prevention and reduction of this phenomenon, as well as the protection of stateless people. This study finds that the Dutch approach to statelessness could be strengthened in these areas, both in the interests of the State and of individual stateless people. 6. Identification is probably the most problematic area. The statistical analysis in this report shows that often no distinction is made between stateless people and those whose nationality is unknown. No uniformity of approach exists between various authorities or institutions in the way stateless people are registered. The common practice in GBA registrations of labelling people as being of unknown nationality because they cannot fulfil the strict evidence requirements for registration as a stateless person precludes enjoyment of the rights enshrined in the 1954 Convention from being activated. The Netherlands has ratified this Convention and thus acknowledged the protection needs of stateless people, but without a proper procedure to establish statelessness, individuals are likely not to be accorded the rights to which they are entitled. in the Netherlands 1