Good practices: the Czech Republic When the former State of Czechoslovakia was formally dissolved on 1 January 1993, both of the two successor States – the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic – adopted new citizenship laws that defined the initial body of citizens of each country and the process through which persons could acquire the nationality of each country. Both sets of legislation, however, were based on Czechoslovakia’s citizenship laws, which were drafted in 1969, and so neither was applicable to the new reality. According to the internal citizenship laws of the two nascent States, persons born before 1954 – i.e., those individuals 15 years or older when the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic became a federation consisting of two republics – were citizens of those States if they were born in the territories of those States (jus soli). Those individuals born after 1954 were considered citizens of the States either on the basis of jus soli (persons born to parents of mixed Czech/Slovak citizenship usually acquired their citizenship based on where they were born), or through the citizenship of their parents (jus sanguinis), when both parents held the same nationality. As a result, many people who lived all their lives in the Czech Republic were given Slovak citizenship and vice versa. Most of the Roma ethnic minority living in the Czech Republic were caught in this legal limbo, since most of them were born on Slovak territory or were descendants of Slovak-born ancestors. While the new Slovak citizenship laws gave an unrestricted right to nationality to all former citizens of Czechoslovakia, the new Czech Citizenship Act introduced strict conditions under which Czech citizenship could be obtained. To acquire Czech citizenship, an individual • had to have maintained and registered continual permanent residency in the territory of the Czech Republic for at least two years prior to the dissolution of the federation; • had to have been exempted from Slovak citizenship; and • could not have been sentenced for an intentional crime in the preceding five years. In the mid-1990s, the Czech and Slovak governments asked UNHCR to assist them in resolving the thousands of cases of statelessness that emerged as a result of the conflicting laws. UNHCR fielded two fact-finding missions to the region and held consultations with the governments on their citizenship laws. In 1996, UNHCR helped to found the Citizenship Advisory Centre, based in Prague. The Centre offers legal and social counselling to former citizens of Czechoslovakia who are stateless, even though they may have long-term and genuine links to the Czech Republic. In one year, 37