30 Allerton The families that I know in Sabah span the full range of possibilities of documentation: from families where parents and children are all fully documented and ‘legal’ to those where no family members have any valid legal documents. However, the majority are somewhere between these two extremes, including many families where members have wildly varying legal statuses. For example, one family consisted of: a father who possessed a ‘Permanent Resident’ identity card, a mother with an expired IMM13 (a document, renewed annually, allowing refugees and their families the right to remain in Malaysia), a grandmother with no documents, an older sister with full Malaysian citizenship thanks to her (paid) ‘adoption’, a brother with an IMM13, and three younger siblings with no documents. But do difficulties in accessing and renewing documents, when combined with the length of time that parents and grandparents have been absent from their home countries, mean that these children are either legally or effectively stateless? 3 ‘Statelessness’ on the Ground in Sabah According to the currently accepted definition of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), outlined in the ‘Prato Conclusions’, an individual is considered legally stateless if all states to which he or she has a ‘relevant’ or ‘factual’ link fail to consider the person as a national.12 In Sabah, children thought to be at risk of statelessness have factual links with Malaysia (as their country of residence and - in the vast majority of cases - of birth) and with at least one other country (usually Indonesia or the Philippines, from where their parents or grandparents originated). Therefore, in the case of children born in Sabah but considered ‘foreign’ by the Malaysian authorities, the key question is whether or not they would be considered nationals by Indonesia or the Philippines. In the case of children of Indonesian parents, this issue is fairly straightforward. Although many children of Indonesian migrants born in Sabah lack documents, there is an Indonesian consulate in Kota Kinabalu which regularly issues birth certificates and passports for the children of its nationals. For children of Indonesians living in the interior of Sabah, the expense of travelling to the city may prohibit the acquisition of such documents, making recognition of Indonesian citizenship theoretically possible, 12 UNHCR, ‘Expert Meeting: The Concept of Statelessness under International Law, Summary Conclusions’. (2010, Prato, Italy). See also Open Society Justice Initiative, ‘De Jure Statelessness in the Real World: Applying the Prato Summary Conclusions’ (Open Society Institute 2011) 4. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 26-34