stateless persons in Canada, who already had access to the H&C mechanism, to obtain legal status for the enjoyment of rights. Children born outside of Canada to a Canadian citizen themselves born outside of Canada (“second generation born abroad”) have the right to obtain citizenship upon application, but only upon meeting certain conditions, including a Canadian residency requirement of 1,095 days over four years. During this period, children are often denied basic human rights, including the right to health, and in some provinces, the right to education. While little information is available on stateless Indigenous persons in Canada, it is known that some Indigenous persons are stateless because their births are not registered and they are unable to prove the country in which they were born (affecting mainly Indigenous communities straddling the border between Canada and the United States). This study demonstrates the important impacts of statelessness on the enjoyment of human rights in Canada. A stateless person’s ability to access many basic services and conditions necessary for the realization of their human rights in Canada is contingent upon their residency status. Stateless persons have various rights and degrees of access to public services depending on their status as permanent or temporary residents, as well as refugees or rejected refugee claimants. Interviews with stateless persons in Canada reveal that due to their lack of status, they experience significant limitations to their economic, social and cultural rights, including their right to work, their right to the highest attainable standard of health, their right to adequate housing, and their right to education. In addition, stateless persons sometimes see their right to liberty seriously limited when they are subject to immigration enforcement detention for being unable to prove their identity and thus considered uncooperative, or where the Canada Border Services Agency determines the detention necessary for the purposes of removal. Some stateless persons have been subject to lengthy and even indefinite detention.4 Stateless persons’ liberty is also limited by their inability to leave Canada for lack of identity and travel documents. Based on these findings, the report calls for the establishment of mechanisms to identify who is stateless in Canada and facilitate their access to naturalization. The report makes five specific recommendations to address legislative and policy gaps to reduce stateless in Canada, to ensure that the rights of stateless persons are fully protected, and to prevent further stateless situations. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA:  Refine data collection to better capture the number of stateless people in Canada in particular disaggregated in immigration categories and those in detention.  Take additional measures to make the humanitarian and compassionate (H&C) mechanism more systematically accessible, predictable and affordable to stateless people in Canada by lowering or waiving administrative fees automatically, by ensuring free legal aid and by It must be recognized however, that Canada’s immigration detention scheme includes a process of ongoing review that allows the detainee the opportunity to challenge their continued detention. 4 v