9 ODI Policy brief Social Finally, non-recognition has a significant impact on the social lives of people living in de facto states. One effect of parent states’ resistance of any attempts by de facto states to acquire the ‘symbolic’ trappings of statehood is that legal documents, currencies and domestically issued licences are of limited value elsewhere. As passports – alongside birth, marriage and death certificates – issued by de facto states are unlikely to be recognised in other countries, many of their inhabitants opt to take the passports of their patron state (as in the case of the 150,000 people in Abkhazia who took Russian citizenship following the expiration of their Soviet passports in 2002), or their parent state (as in the cases of Transnistria and Northern Cyprus). Nonrecognition of university accreditations has clear consequences for individuals’ capacity to access higher education in other territories. As de Waal (2018: 7) observes: ‘The challenge of living in a de facto state is summed up by the drop-down box on an internet form that asks which country a person lives in. If Abkhazia or Transnistria is not listed, the person faces an immediate problem’. However, in this case as in others, the possibilities for engaging de facto states are more extensive in practice than on paper. France, the UK and the US have for many years accepted Turkish Cypriot passports as valid travel documents (de Waal, 2018), while since 2018 a Somaliland passport, when presented alongside a residence permit, is accepted by the UK as a valid travel document (Somtribune, 2018). Similarly, while the legal status of de facto states, as well as the application of international human rights law to them, remains uncertain, there is growing consensus that de facto entities exercising a government-like function (ranging from armed ‘rebel’ groups to de facto states) are covered by international human rights law and international humanitarian law (see Heintze, 2010; Tan, 2019). The European Court of Human Rights has placed responsibility on patron states for claims raised against de facto states by outsiders in cases involving Transnistria and Northern Cyprus (in this instance, Russia and Turkey). The picture for those living in de facto states is less clear. British case law has, for example, established a precedent holding that de facto states exercise legal and political authority over their citizens in everyday matters (de Waal, 2018). However, the scope for enforcement of such rulings in unrecognised states is likely to be extremely limited. The drastic limiting of the life prospects of people in de facto states is one major result of the political and economic effects of non-recognition, and drives a process of continuous emigration, in turn further reducing the prospects for social, economic and political development. While precise statistics are hard to come by (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the resource demands of conducting a census and the political undesirability for de facto states’ governments of publicly acknowledging a decreasing population), scholars have observed a trend of depopulation in the former Soviet de facto states (de Waal, 2018b; Kolosov and Zotova, 2021). It has been suggested that Somaliland and Puntland’s official population figures of 3.5 million each are significantly inflated (given the standard total estimated population of Somalia is around 10 million) (Hoehne, 2015).