I. Introduction The international legal definition of a stateless person is “a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law”2. In simple terms, this means that a stateless person does not have the nationality of any country. Some people are born stateless, but others become stateless later in life. Indeed, some families have been stateless for generations. Statelessness can occur for several reasons, such as discrimination against particular ethnic or religious minorities, or on the basis of gender; or due to the dissolution of States and the emergence of new ones (State succession), transfers of territories between existing States, or gaps in nationality laws. Lack of birth registration and difficulties in accessing civil registration documents may also create a risk of statelessness. Further possible contributing factors include wars, conflicts and displacement of people. Whatever the cause, statelessness has serious consequences for people in almost every country and in all regions of the world, including the 57 OSCE participating States3 and the 11 OSCE Mediterranean and Asian Partners for Co-operation4. According to the statistics that UNHCR compiles each year, at the end of 2015, there were more than 722,000 stateless persons with no or unclear citizenship status in the OSCE area. The majority of them are former Soviet Union citizens. Almost 10,000 are still found in the countries that made up the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), mostly among Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities.5 The stateless population in the other countries in Europe mostly consists of persons who moved from successor States to the former Soviet Union and the former SFRY, or from beyond Europe, as well as their children born stateless in Europe. Under UNHCR’s statelessness mandate, around 130,000 persons have been reported in Central Asia.6 While primarily a by-product of the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, other contributing factors are migration, including in the context of civil war and mixed marriages; gaps in nationality legislation; and policy or administrative obstacles that prevent the 9