UNHCR, APRIL 2023 • • • • REFUGEES FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION supporting documents required are not impossible to supply, and that a decision is taken within reasonable time and notified to the applicant, with reasons in case of rejection. Adapt refugee registration and (where relevant) refugee status determination procedures to ensure that risks of statelessness are assessed and recorded so that appropriate additional protection measures can be put in place to reduce those risks, according to national context. Provide in law for the minimum protections against statelessness that are set out in Article 6(4) of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, especially for children born in the territory who do not acquire nationality from a parent. Establish procedures to implement these protections against statelessness in practice, including referral mechanisms among the institutions responsible for refugees, civil registration, child protection, and nationality and immigration, and train civil registry and other relevant officials on these procedures. Accede to the international conventions on statelessness, where they have not already done so, and ensure that national laws conform with their provisions. Terminology A detailed explanation of key terms used in this report is included in Annex 2. The most important terms are the following: Long-term refugee: A term without a definition in international law or UNHCR policy, but used in this report to mean refugees who have been more than twenty years in the country of asylum, and to include children born in the country of asylum who have derivative refugee status through their parents . The term is used to distinguish the focus of the study from “protracted refugee situations”, a term used by UNHCR to refer to a situation where refugees have been displaced for five or more years outside their country of origin. Citizenship/nationality: Terms used as synonyms in international law to describe a particular legal relationship between a person and a state that is defined in national law. In this report, the terms are used according to the terminology of national law, and “nationality” is used at international level. Stateless person: The 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons defines a stateless person as “a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law” (Article 1(1)). UNHCR notes that determining whether a person is stateless is a mixed question of fact and law, and thus a person may be stateless even if apparently entitled to citizenship in law, because they cannot prove the relevant facts. 5