October 2024 laws, State succession, or deprivation of nationality practices, they or their children may be stateless or have undetermined nationality. Recent reforms through the EU Migration & Asylum Pactiv (including in the Screening Regulation and the Asylum Procedures Regulation) have introduced provisions requiring Member States to identify where an individual may be stateless. These provisions must now be implemented over the next two years, including with support from the EU Asylum Agency. ENS has developed and is planning further rollout of national toolkits to support identification and access to protection for stateless refugees and migrants in Europe and beyond. The fact that an asylum applicant may be stateless is critical when assessing their claim for international protection. Whether someone is stateless or a national of their country of origin not only impacts on the decision-making process, but also on the nationality rights of their children, and access to procedures such as family reunification, resettlement, or naturalisation (as well as the possibility of return) because they are unlikely to have documentary proof of their identity and family links. Stateless people are due specific rights under international law and risk further discrimination and rights violations if their statelessness is not identified and acted upon. The solution to address these problems is relatively simple. As a first step, improved mechanisms for identifying stateless people encountered by the authorities, including those claiming asylum, must be introduced – including by implementing relevant provisions in the EU Migration & Asylum Pact. As a second step, all European States should establish dedicated statelessness determination procedures (SDPs) that are fair, efficient and easily accessible. This would enable States to determine who is stateless on their territory and grant them protection, thereby both fulfilling their obligations under international law and providing a sustainable solution for individuals who cannot return to their countries of origin or former residence. Yet, currently only a handful of European countries v have these procedures in place. Today, children are still being born in Europe without a nationality vi despite the existence of a clear normative framework that should prevent this. Many have inherited their statelessness from stateless parents, while others are the first in their family to experience statelessness, including due to a gap or conflict in nationality laws. More than half of European States are still failing to properly implement their obligations to ensure that children acquire a nationality. Our Statelessness Indexvii continues to document a worrying array of problems in the detail of many nationality laws, as well as in the laws and practices governing procedures for birth registrationviii, which helps to establish and document a child’s nationality. Due to discrimination, certain groups of children in Europe are disproportionately affected by barriers to birth registration, including members of minority groups such as Romani childrenix, refugees and migrants, and children of same-sex couplesx. Numerous countriesxi in Europe have failed to include basic safeguards in law, such as to grant nationality to a child born on the territory who would otherwise be stateless, or to a child whose parents are unknown. Even where laws do provide a remedy to prevent childhood statelessness, there is evidence that these safeguards do not always work in practice because of limited awareness or a lack of guidelines on how and when to apply them. As a result of these and other gaps, thousands of children who have strong and clear connections to Europe are growing up without the protection or sense of belonging xii that a nationality bestows. No child chooses to be stateless, and this can never be in a child’s best interests. Complementing UNHCR’s global #IBelong campaign, ENS has sought to address the historic lack of attention paid to statelessness through a series of regional campaigns over the last decade (#StatelessKids drawing attention to childhood statelessness; #LockedInLimbo on arbitrary detention of stateless people; 2