UNDERSTANDING STATELESSNESS IN THE SYRIA REFUGEE CONTEXT  access to another. A Maktoum refugee is likely to be undocumented; a person who is undocumented may find it more difficult to register as a refugee; an undocumented or unregistered refugee can struggle to register the birth of a child, as may a female-headed refugee family, which can cause a delay beyond the statutory deadline and make the registration more complex. As such, some refugees face multiple issues and would fall into several of the risk profiles outlined. In order to strengthen the capacity of organisations in the region to provide tailored and specialised help where needed (i.e. to help mitigate the risk of statelessness where this may be most significant) it is therefore important not only to flag particular profiles of refugees whose situation may require further attention, but to clarify the underlying reasons for this vulnerability. Practitioners will then be better equipped to recognise the foundational issue in a complex case and can also identify refugees beyond these specific categories who face a heightened risk of statelessness due to the operation of the same law and policy framework. As such, it is of interest to provide a straightforward overview of the risk profiles that practitioners should be alert to. This overview needs to be comprehensible to a non-specialist audience, while also offering enough technical detail to explain why a heightened risk of statelessness may arise in these cases. Moreover, it is critical to recognise that in many such cases, a refugee will require specialist assistance to navigate, for instance, the civil registration process. Tools which support the establishment and use of referral mechanisms for complex cases would therefore also be valuable. 6.3 STATELESS REFUGEES Some refugees are already stateless. Their lack of nationality may have been a cause of their displacement or, in a situation of generalised violence or conflict, it may simply be that the existing stateless population are displaced as well as others (perhaps even more readily due to their vulnerability and lack of alternatives in country). In the context of the Syria regional refugee response, it is vital to recognise that there was already a stateless population in Syria prior to the conflict. This population included stateless Kurds (two categories, Ajanib Kurds and Maktoum Kurds), Palestinians (PRS) and various isolated profiles. Some refugees may also have become stateless while displaced due to gender discrimination in the Syrian nationality law and potentially the deprivation of Syrian nationality from refugees. This study found that refugees who are stateless are not always identified as such. Even when there statelessness is identified, it is not always recorded. At the same time, the research showed that the situation of these refugees is made more precarious by their statelessness. Stateless refugees face heightened protection risks, which include inability to access civil registration, restricted movement and pressure to return to Syria. Some PRS appear to be unable to register for assistance with either UNRWA or UNHCR. There were also signs that statelessness may be a factor which complicates access to durable solutions for refugees from Syria, including limiting access to resettlement programmes. An underlying issue identified in the research was that there is a substantial knowledge gap when it comes to statelessness issues among stakeholders that work with refugees. There is a lack of awareness and/or understanding of the stateless profiles among refugees from Syria and mechanisms through which stateless refugees may be identified or recorded. For example, none of the intake forms among the INGOs interviewed provide for the possibility of recording a refugee as a stateless person. This poor identification and tracking of cases of statelessness is a major contributing factor to the lack of visibility of this sub-set of the refugee population and the lack of information on their situation and particular vulnerabilities. While the issues described above were flagged in the research, it is unclear how prevalent the problems are among all stateless refugees in the region. The starting point for better understanding and responding to the specific vulnerabilities of stateless refugees must be to increase awareness of the interplay between statelessness and displacement, including specifically of the existence of various profiles of stateless refugee who have fled Syria. As with refugees at heightened risk of statelessness, there is a need both for simple tools to aid in the identification of relevant cases, as well as more in depth research into what it means to be, for instance, a stateless Maktoum Kurd refugee. RESEARCH REPORT 57