12 … Albarazi ‘I worried my sons would get deported. I worried my sons would get arrested. They can legally live nowhere. Deportation. Arrest. Deportation. Arrest. These worries took over my life, destroying me, and made me a crazed women’1 Um Adam … ‘The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.’ Article 16(3), Universal Declaration of Human Rights ∵ 1 Introduction Um Adam is an Egyptian woman who had four stateless children, four of the many millions of stateless persons worldwide, who spoke extensively of the worry she had about being separated from her children because of their status. Statelessness is often framed as a complex legal phenomenon where those who have this status are both excluded from the legal protectionary regime, whilst suffering under the legal punitive regime. The discourse in the international field has focused on the definition of a stateless person and the legal limbo that this leaves them in - such as flaws in nationality legislation, and attempts to regularize their status. Due to this, it was only recently that we have begun to discuss, through developing engagement with the affected populations and their own mobilization, the dire consequences this status has on access to fundamental rights. We know that denying access to the right nationality is in violation of many norms and obligations, and additionally nationality has often become the right to access many other rights. Nevertheless, 1 An interview conducted with Um Adam (March 2013), an Egyptian woman married to a foreigner, whose children were stateless before a change in the law in 2004, which allowed her to transfer her nationality to her children. This was part of research conducted for the Women’s Refugee Commission, Our Motherland, Our Country: Gender Discrimination and Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa, June 2013: a project which inspired this article. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 11-19