Tran Hoang Phuc, formerly stateless for 35 years, is surrounded by other formerly stateless people who have questions about the rights conferred by their new red family books. © UNHCR / K. McKinsey Statelessness among Vietnamese women who left Viet Nam to marry foreigners was found to be another pressing issue in need of a solution. In 2005, the Vietnamese and French Governments co-convened an international conference addressing the phenomenon of “economic marriages” of Vietnamese women to foreigners.41 The Vietnamese Ministry of Justice estimated that between 1997 and 2005, more than 180,000 Vietnamese women had married foreigners, and that at least 10,000 additional marriages to foreigners occurred each year from 2005 to 2009. Most Vietnamese women moved abroad to marry their foreign husbands. It was the norm that a woman would acquire the nationality of her new husband in the new country of residence. Because most countries in Asia prohibit dual nationality, some Vietnamese women renounced their Vietnamese nationality to apply to acquire the nationality of their foreign husbands. However, an estimated 10 per cent of the marriages between Vietnamese women and foreign men resulted in divorce. Vietnamese women who had renounced their Vietnamese nationality and either failed to finalize the process to acquire the nationality of their foreign husbands or automatically lost their newly acquired foreign nationalities upon dissolution of their marriages found themselves stateless. In 2006, the Vietnamese Government estimated that at least 3,000 women had returned to Viet Nam due to such circumstances and were stateless. They were accompanied by at least 3,000 children born abroad who had undetermined nationality. UNHCR identified three priorities for preventing and reducing statelessness in Viet Nam: resolving the nationality status of the former stateless Cambodian refugees living in Viet Nam; devising solutions for those women who had renounced their Vietnamese nationality upon marriage to a foreigner that rendered them stateless; and promoting reform of Vietnamese nationality legislation in order to fill legal gaps and thereby prevent new cases of statelessness. 41 32 The publication of presentations (« Receuil des Interventions ») made at this regional conference entitled: « Les aspects pratiques du Droit international privé des personnes, de la famille et des biens » convened in Hanoi from 25 to 17 May 2005 is on file with UNHCR’s Statelessness Unit. CAMPAIGN TO END STATELESSNESS WITHIN 10 YE ARS