Joint Submission to the Human Rights Council at the 39th Session of the Universal Periodic Review HUNGARY Introduction 1. The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, the European Network on Statelessness and the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) make this joint submission to the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), on the right to a nationality and human rights challenges pertaining to statelessness in Hungary. 2. Much remains to be done to ensure the complete and effective fulfilment of Hungary’s international obligations to guarantee the right to a nationality and protect the rights of stateless persons on the territory. This submission focuses on the most significant gaps in Hungarian law and practice, which result in increased risks of new cases of statelessness in Hungary, undermine the human right to a nationality, and result in violations of stateless persons’ rights in the country. In particular, this submission focuses on: I. II. III. The right of every child to acquire a nationality and the prevention of statelessness at birth; Identifying and determining statelessness to ensure stateless persons’ access to economic and social rights; and The right of stateless persons to acquire a nationality through facilitated naturalisation. 3. The Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) is a leading human rights organisation in Central Europe, focusing primarily on the rule of law, justice and refugee rights. Since its foundation in 1989, the HHC has provided free legal assistance to tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, refugees, detainees and victims of human rights violations committed by law enforcement agencies. The HHC was one of the first organisations in the world to start addressing the then largely unknown human rights issue of statelessness in the migratory context in 2006. Since then, it has published several pioneering research studies on this issue and has trained over a thousand professionals on this issue on three continents. The HHC’s outstanding work as a human rights champion has been awarded with nine prestigious human rights prizes since 2017. 1