Questioning de facto Statelessness 279 citizen who, despite their equal legal bond to their State, are not in the same right receiving or obtaining position as other more valued citizens. Therefore, this understanding would include large amounts of the world’s population as suffering from various forms of ineffective citizenship, such as the female citizens of Qatar who have fewer rights than male citizens, or even arguably, citizen prisoners who have fewer rights than their fellow non-incarcerated citizens. Second, de facto statelessness has been labelled on those seen in a migratory setting, such as people who have a nationality ‘but whose status where they reside is not legal because they are illegal, irregular, or undocumented migrants in their current location’.9 This understanding would encompass a vast number of the world’s migrants, whose illegal status in a country means their citizenship is ineffective as they are unable or unwilling to secure certain rights their fellow citizens receive when residing legally in a country other than their own. These two examples reflect some of the diversity surrounding the concept of de facto statelessness, however to really explore de facto statelessness/ citizenship, I will refrain from using a minor deviation from the norms of equally effective citizenship. Instead I will use an example of possibly the world’s most credible de facto citizen de jure stateless population, the stateless Estonians of Russian origin. I use this population to show that even at the extreme of de facto citizenship, their de jure statelessness is still of great concern. 3 The de facto Citizens But de jure Stateless Estonians of Russian Origin By considering one of the strongest claims for de facto citizenship for a de jure stateless population the importance and centrality of the legal definition of statelessness and the function of citizenship is reinforced, thus problematizing de facto citizenship - and by association de facto statelessness. The population chosen for this are the de jure stateless Estonians of Russian origin. This group largely consists of migrants from the Soviet Union to Estonia and their descendants, who, with the fall of the Soviet Union did not acquire citizenship of Russia or Estonia,10 thus making this group de jure stateless. Numbering 9 10 J. Bhabha, Children without a state (MIT, Cambridge 2001) 1. A more detailed analysis on the causes of the statelessness can be found in Järve and Poleshchuk, ‘EUDO Citizenship Observatory: Country Report Estonia’ (2013). tilburg law review 19 (2014) 276-284