documents. In the city of Uzhgorod there is just one pro bono licensed lawyer in private practice supporting Roma applying for internal passports or late birth registration. This is obviously not sufficient for the needs of the entire region of Transcarpathia. At the vast majority of LACs, Roma without personal documents are not in a position even to be provided with the secondary legal aid needed for initiating the civil or administrative procedures for obtaining personal documents. In other words, in order to get legal aid to apply for an internal passport, Roma need to provide the authorities with an internal passport. Of the three LACs visited in the regions, the only exception to this was witnessed in the Transcarpathia region, where the LAC in Uzhgorod accepts a certificate of identity provided by a local NGO as identification – this is either a membership card, or an extract from the membership registry, or simply a certificate stating the holder’s name and date of birth.97 In order to overcome obstacles to accessing to free secondary legal aid it is highly important to allow people with no identification to apply for and be eligible for secondary legal aid and to receive it, especially in cases related to establishing the fact of birth. Legal remedy for Roma without access to personal documents Another important aspect of access to justice for Roma in cases related to their personal documents is related to the right to legal remedy. During the course of the research, the administrative practice of so-called “oral rejections” was identified as well-established in situations where Roma are not able to provide the authorities with all the required documents when applying for birth registration or an internal passport. In these cases the authorities are legally entitled to orally reject applications for internal passports or birth registration. This means there is no record of this official rejection and therefore the decision cannot be appealed. In some cases this is done simply by not accepting the application with the attached documents, while in other cases the application is rejected after a preliminary inspection of the documents attached. While it is clear that in cases where certain documents are not provided the application should indeed be rejected, the administrative practice of verbal rejection strips Roma and others of their right to appeal and to use all existing legal remedies in such cases. None of the Roma interviewed during the field visits ever appealed to a secondinstance administrative body or court when they were rejected while applying for personal documents or instructed to initiate a court procedure to obtain them. Finally, it is worth noting that in some cases the Roma without personal documents who are referred to the court procedure for the establishment of the fact of birth are actually unable to initiate this procedure precisely because they lack identification. Awareness-raising, information campaigns and outreach Active engagement of authorities in awareness-raising and conducting information campaigns should be an integral part of the strategy to tackle the lack of civil registration and identification 97 Information from the meeting with the LAC in Uzhgorod, 20 March 2017. 37