apartment in their ownership or apartment lease agreement, or who cannot register permanent residence on any other legal basis, to register permanent residence at the address of their factual residence, at the address of permanent residence of their marital or common-law spouse or parent, or at the address of the social welfare centre in whose territory they live30. These are usually persons who live in informal settlements, primarily Roma, whose houses are not legalized and who do not have an address or house number where they would register permanent residence. Although in many cases it would be most appropriate to register permanent residence at the address of spouse or parents, it happens very rarely in practice. The persons who attempted to register permanent residence at the address of spouse were often required to provide evidence on ownership (or lease) of the apartment where the spouse was registered, which actually renders meaningless the option of registering at the spouse’s address, because this would be on the basis of ownership. The parties in such situations can only try to register permanent residence at the address of social welfare centre. Although at the beginning the competent authorities often did not know how to conduct the procedure of permanent residence registration at the address of social welfare centre, over the past year or two, this practice has been functioning well. Now it happens more and more rarely that the persons who want to register permanent residence in this way are verbally refused even before receiving or considering their request or that social welfare centres refuse to verify the form of permanent residence registration at their address (although they are obliged to do that always when the MoI assesses that the requirements for permanent residence registration are met)31. However, it has been noticed that in several police stations it occurs that the parties are instructed to address first the social welfare centre for the purpose of examining the possibility of permanent residence registration at their address, although it is contrary to the established procedure, according to which the persons submit requests to police stations, which perform necessary checks and then address social welfare centres through official channels.32 The biggest problem is the MoI’s position that the legal provisions regulating the registration of permanent residence at the addresses of spouses, parents or SWCs apply only to the persons who do not have registered permanent residence at all, but not to those who are registered somewhere although they have not lived at those addresses for a long time and regardless of whether such places are not the centre of their life activities any longer. For that reason a large number of people – including also the majority of residents of some informal Roma settlements, whose permanent residence is still registered in Kosovo – remain without the possibility of registering permanent residence in the places in which they actually live and which are their factual places of permanent residence. This leads to extremely difficult access to the rights related to the place of permanent residence, such as health care and social protection or the rights arising from unemployment. REFUSAL OF REQUESTS: In 2016, Praxis did not have many cases of refused requests for permanent residence registration, but, like in the previous years, these decisions usually had typical forms and did not contain valid explanations. The reason for refusal was usually that “the intention of the submitter of request to live at the specified address has not been 30 Article 11, paragraphs 1 and 2 of the Law on Permanent and Temporary Residence of Citizens Instruction on procedure of the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Policy no. 110-00-271/2012-14, of 19 June 2013 32 Explanations of the Ministry of Interior about the way of handling citizens’ requests for the registration of permanent residence at the address of the institution in which they are permanently placed or the social welfare centre in whose territory they live, of 20 July 2013 31 21