104 Swider and den Heijer This runs counter to the very objective of establishing common approaches to questions of admission and residence of third-country nationals. From the EU’s perspective, it would be only natural to harmonize the conditions under which stateless persons, similar to other categories of third-country nationals, can participate in the Union-wide area of free movement. The potential benefits of EU-wide action on statelessness are from time to time pointed out by academics and international and non-governmental organizations.6 In 2005, a UNHCR study on the implementation of the 1954 Convention in EU Member States mentioned a number of areas related to the protection of stateless persons that could benefit from EU harmonization.7 These included identification mechanisms, conditions for permitting lawful stay, mutual recognition of determinations on statelessness and the treatment to be accorded to stateless persons. There has been, however, no follow-up on these recommendations on the EU level, and UNHCR also seems to have stopped pursuing the issue.8 More recent academic publications advocate softlaw EU measures on statelessness, assuming that there is no EU competence to pass relevant legislation.9 We take issue with that assumption, and will explain why an EU instrument on statelessness respects the division of competences between the EU and its Member States, why it meets the principle of subsidiarity, and what the EU Treaty basis for such an instrument can be. 6 Gyulai, G., ‘Statelessness in the EU Framework for International protection’, 14 European Journal of Migration and Law (2012) 284, 294–295; Molnar, T., ‘Stateless Persons under International Law and EU Law: a Comparative Analysis Concerning their Legal Status, with Particular Attention to the Added Value of the EU Legal Order’, 51 Acta Juridica Hungarica (2010) 303; Waas, L. van, ‘EU Citizenship for Stateless People?’, European Network on Statelessness Blog (5 November 2013), www.statelessness.eu/blog/eu-citizenship-stateless-people; Groot, G.R. de, K. Swider, O. Vonk, Practices and Approaches in EU Member States to Prevent and End Statelessness, Study for the LIBE Committee, Nov. 2015 (Brussels, European Parliament, 2015), pp. 54–59. 7  Batchelor, C., ‘The 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons: Implementation Within the European Union Member States and Recommendations for Harmonization’, 22(2) Refuge (2005) 31–58. 8 In its 2015 recommendations to the EU presidency, UNHCR did call for attention to end statelessness, but stopped short of recommending EU legislative action: UNHCR’s recommendations to Luxembourg and the Netherlands for the EU Presidency, July 2015. 9 Gyulai, G., ‘Statelessness in the EU Framework for International protection’, 14 European Journal of Migration and Law (2012) 284, 294–295; Molnar, T., ‘Stateless Persons under International Law and EU Law: a Comparative Analysis Concerning their Legal Status, with Particular Attention to the Added Value of the EU Legal Order’, 51 Acta Juridica Hungarica (2010) 303. European Journal of Migration and Law 19 (2017) 101–135