5. Concluding remarks and recommendations Current Norwegian law has quite strong safeguards against statelessness with regard to persons born to Norwegian citizens abroad, foundlings, and loss, renunciation, and deprivation of Norwegian nationality. Indeed, some of these protections are very strong and overcompliant with international standards. Norway also has a good practice with regard to facilitated naturalization of stateless persons in the form of a greatly reduced residence period for stateless persons seeking naturalization. However, stateless persons seeking to naturalize must do so on a ground independent of their statelessness. In a number of areas, there are gaps in Norwegian law. The national legislation contains no definition of a stateless person, and one statutory provision impermissibly seeks to limit the scope of who will be deemed stateless. Nor is there a determination procedure or a formally recognized status of stateless with accompanying rights, including to identity and travel documents. When persons who arrive in Norway in a migratory context have contact with the authorities, their nationality or statelessness will be registered when establishing their identity. However, the lack of consistent guidelines used by the registering authorities, and the absence of a statelessness determination procedure, appears to lead to inconsistencies in such registrations, and to the lack of recognition of persons as stateless. Accordingly, there are imperfections in statistics on statelessness. Importantly, Norwegian law does not specifically provide for the grant of nationality to persons born in Norway who would otherwise be stateless. Therefore, in order to facilitate Norway’s full compliance with its obligations under the 1954 and 1961 Conventions and to ensure that stateless persons be able to enjoy the rights to which they are entitled, UNHCR makes the following suggestions and recommendations. Identification and registration of statelessness IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT CONSISTENT ADMINISTRATIVE GUIDELINES BE USED BY ALL OF THE AUTHORITIES THAT MAY REGISTER PERSONS AS STATELESS in the context of immigration and residence-related procedures/situations, to ensure that the respective authorities use the same definition of statelessness and apply the same criteria and procedural standards, including on burden and standard of proof. This would help to streamline the working methods and facilitate a consistent approach, and ensure that only those individuals who are stateless are registered as such, as well as avoid the risk of having the same individual registered in different ways in the existing registration systems and databases. IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT THE DEFINITION OF A STATELESS PERSON SET FORTH IN ARTICLE 1 OF THE 1954 CONVENTION BE INCORPORTED IN NATIONAL LEGISLATION to strengthen the understanding and application of the binding definition of a stateless person in Norwegian law and practice. 52 M A P P I N G STAT E L E S S N E S S I N N O RWAY