UN treaties it has ratified, including in relation to Article 13 of the ICCPR which protects non-citizens from unlawful expulsion from the territory. Furthermore, Malta has in place several reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women impacting on women’s equality. 9. Malta is not state party to the 1954 or 1961 Statelessness Conventions. 10. At the regional level, Malta is a state party to the European Convention on Human Rights. It has signed but not acceded to the European Convention on Nationality. It has fully transposed the EU Returns Directive into domestic law. STATELESSNESS IN MALTA 11. Malta provides very limited protection for stateless people. Although it is party to some relevant international and regional human rights treaties, it is not party to any of the core statelessness conventions. 12. Maltese law provides some protections against arbitrary detention, but rights afforded to people detained for removal purposes, for example, are very limited. 13. Malta has no mechanism to identify and determine statelessness, and no stateless protection status. 14. Data on the stateless population is limited, with figures available only for the very small number of stateless people who acquire Maltese citizenship and refused asylum seekers recorded as ‘nationality not known’ who cannot be returned and may or may not be stateless. STATELESSNESS POPULATION DATA 15. There is very limited disaggregated population data on statelessness in Malta. 16. There is no ‘stateless’ category in the census, although the question of whether someone has Maltese or ‘any foreign citizenship’ was asked in the last census in 2011. The Annual Demographic Review has a ‘stateless’ category in its data on acquisition of Maltese citizenship and the Office of the Refugee Commissioner reports on those with ‘nationality not known’ among refused asylum seekers who cannot be returned. 17. The Government does not publish data on stateless people in detention and statelessness is not systematically recorded across government agencies. A 2014 UNHCR mapping study provides detailed commentary on the legislative framework relating to statelessness in Malta. STATELESSNESS DETERMINATION AND STATUS 18. There is no mechanism to identify or determine statelessness in Malta nor any dedicated protection status for stateless people. 3