Identifying the Problem: A Gap in Legal Education and Services for Stateless Children in Australia ‘Our lawyer at RACS first told us about applying for citizenship for our two youngest children – we didn’t know this was possible. Sometimes I wonder – if they hadn’t told me about this process, how would I know? Applying for citizenship – even knowing it is a possibility – would be too hard for us to navigate without a lawyer.’ Amir, stateless Palestinian father of fourlvi After several years of providing legal representation to stateless asylum seekers, my colleague Sarah Dalelvii and I decided to investigate whether our vocational understanding of this unmet legal need was supported by research. We approached the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness (PMCS), established at Melbourne Law School in 2018 by Professor Michelle Foster with very generous philanthropic support from Peter and Ruth McMullin. As the Centre is the world’s only academic centre dedicated to statelessness, we applied for seed funding from the PMCS to conduct research on the gap in legal services for stateless children. In our resulting report ‘A Place to Call Home’, we identified three main findings discussed below. a) Lack of Knowledge of Legal Rights Research supported our observed experience that parents of stateless children were unlikely to know their child has a potential claim to Australian citizenship.lviii Stateless parents were usually informed of this entitlement when (or if) their lawyer protectively flagged it with them, often inadvertently in the course of receiving advice about their refugee and or immigration status. Poor awareness of the entitlement to apply for citizenship within the stateless community was found to be complicated by a general lack of knowledge and expertise pertaining to statelessness in the Australian legal profession.lix Furthermore, we identified a lack of targeted legal outreach within stateless communities regarding this entitlement and, more fundamentally, a lack of legal services to assist stateless children with these claims.lx While some Australian refugee legal aid service providers had been assisting stateless children to go through this citizenship application process, this was on an ad hoc basis, based on the lawyer’s initiative and knowledge of this provision and complimentary to the person’s substantive temporary visa application. There was no targeted service for a dedicated program to assist these children or identify their location and actively educate them on their rights. 32