AN AGENDA FOR CHANGE 1 9 The situation described by Farid will be familiar to stateless people across Europe. The experiences of men and women interviewed for the research point to broken systems characterised by mistrust, lack of awareness, and a failure to apply established legal standards. Evidence emerged of authorities failing to act with due diligence, to be proportionate and reasonable, and to protect people’s rights. The result is stateless people (or those at risk of statelessness) being exposed to arbitrariness, discrimination, and systemic exclusion, punished for their lack of documentation or country that would accept them for removal. As clearly set out in the Regional Toolkit for Practitioners, universal and regional legal norms and standards provide for protection against arbitrary detention. Furthermore, the country reports outline existing safeguards against discrimination and arbitrariness in national legal frameworks. Whilst some good practice can be identified, the failure in Europe is largely one of implementation. Key to this is the failure to identify statelessness and therefore to provide suitable protection and effectively implement alternatives to detention. STATELESSNESS AND DETENTION IN EUROPE UNHCR estimates there to be around 600,000 stateless persons in Europe today. Over 80% of the total reported population live in four countries – Estonia, Latvia, the Russian Federation and Ukraine – and their statelessness can be traced back to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While these numbers give an indication of the scale of statelessness in the region, data is sparse and often incomplete. Statelessness remains, therefore, a largely hidden phenomenon. The lack of accurate data and information about stateless persons is even more acute where immigration detention is concerned, which effectively renders people and their suffering invisible. This in turn makes it difficult to plan or respond at a policy level and means that authorities have little awareness of the issues and, in some cases, deny the existence of any problem. • In the Netherlands, the government estimates the stateless population to be around 5,000, but there are also over 80,000 people in the country whose nationality is ‘unknown’. While most of these people are likely to have a nationality, statelessness may be hidden within this figure. There is no data on how many stateless people are in detention. • In Ukraine, there is no reliable data on the size of the stateless population. Estimates range from 6,500 to close to 50,000. The Ukrainian detention framework does not consider or count statelessness. • In the UK, the number of stateless persons is unknown, and data on stateless persons in detention is flawed and incomplete. The stateless are often wrongly attributed a nationality or categorised as ‘persons with unknown nationality’, so the real numbers are likely to be higher than the published figures. • In Bulgaria, there are significant issues with the recording of statelessness in the context of detention. On being detained, people are often simply assigned a nationality by the authorities according to where they are deemed to have come from or have cultural or historical links. • In Malta, data on statelessness is very limited as official statistics group stateless people with third country nationals. Stories of suffering, of indifference to suffering, and of great human cost, pepper the research findings across this project. They point to small numbers of stateless people and those at risk of statelessness facing deeply damaging, life changing and unnecessary detention because their statelessness is invisible to the authorities, or their stories are not believed. Stateless men, women, and children affected by immigration detention in the six research countries came from a range of different backgrounds with different identities, rights, and vulnerabilities. They included migrants, refused asylum seekers, disabled people, ethnic minorities, foundlings, and survivors of abuse, torture, and trafficking. Here are some of their stories: