Chapter 1 describes government, UN and civil society initiatives to identify stateless persons through registration campaigns, population censuses and surveys. Chapter 2 analyses law and administrative practice relating to the acquisition, change, loss and deprivation of nationality and identifies gaps in legislation and its practical implementation that can lead to statelessness.2 Chapter 3 looks at government procedures aimed at determining the status of stateless persons, and their dependents, and considers to what extent they incorporate due process guarantees. Chapter 4 analyses what protection stateless persons enjoy against exploitation and violence, and whether this extends to vulnerable groups among them, like stateless children. The access of stateless persons to basic goods and essential services is assessed in Chapter 5. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the opportunities stateless persons have for self-reliance and full participation in the communities around them. 1.1 Demographic Profile The break-up of the Soviet Union and the emergence of newly independent states led to increased migration and large-scale statelessness in the Central Asian region and elsewhere. Almost twenty years later, thousands of people have been left stateless or with undetermined nationality, because they failed to acquire or confirm the nationality of any of the States with which they had ties through birth, descent or habitual residence. They came to this situation by different paths, but most were affected one way or another by the process of state succession. Others became stateless more recently, for instance as a result of legal provisions which cause automatic loss of citizenship if a citizen resides abroad for several years without registering at a consulate. Almost all stateless people and persons at risk of statelessness in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are former citizens of the USSR. Many live in border areas and were made stateless by the post-Soviet demarcation of territories. A second group are labour migrants. Yet another group are people moving back to their ethnic ‘homelands’, sometimes to places from where they were deported in the Soviet era. The great majority of stateless persons in each State originate from within the Central Asian region. No complete and up-to-date demographic picture of statelessness in the five Central Asian States is available. Between 2008 and 2012 each State will carry out a census that includes a question on nationality. As the answers will be based on a self-assessment of nationality status, they may not provide sufficiently reliable data on the actual number of stateless persons,3 but they will shed some light on the geographical spread of stateless persons, their age and gender. In Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, official statistics on stateless persons include only people with a permanent residence permit in the country and an official document certifying them as stateless. There are no official statistics on stateless persons in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, though there is an estimate for the former. 1.2 Identification Identifying stateless populations and understanding why they either never acquired nationality or subsequently lost it, can lay the ground for strategies to resolve the problem. UNHCR’s Executive Committee, which is made up of 78 States, has therefore encouraged UNHCR “to undertake and share research, particularly in the regions where little research is done on statelessness, with relevant 2 No field studies and country report were carried out in Uzbekistan, where UNHCR has had no presence since 2005. In this regional report, an analysis of the Uzbek Citizenship Law and related legislation has nevertheless been included for the purpose of a comprehensive comparison of the legal frameworks in the region. Any reference to Uzbekistan in the report is based on a limited desk review of available information. 3 Many persons who identify as stateless may in fact, unknown to them, hold the nationality of a state with which they have a connection, while other persons may wrongly assume that they are nationals of a state, when this state does not recognize them as its citizens. ~4~