stateless status and expulsion from italian territory 161 It is therefore reasonable that the Corte di Cassazione, in the case discussed here, ruled that it was the duty of the trial judge to verify whether the defendant, since he was born and raised in Italy (a country with which he actually had a significant connection), should have been considered stateless. 5 Concluding Remarks The short judgment here commented provides an opportunity to reflect on the particularly vulnerable situation of stateless persons. In the case at hand, the defendant – although he was born in Italy and had always lived in Italy – had not acquired Italian citizenship, nor had he proven to have Serbian nationality, despite having a Serbian mother, as his father was a citizen of Kosovo, a country not recognized by Serbia. Similarly, he had failed to prove that he had Kosovar nationality. The establishment of statelessness is relevant in this case because, in the event of such a condition occurring, the prohibition on expulsion laid down in the New York Convention of 1954 would also be applicable. Since the trial court did not make such a finding, the appeal was upheld by the Corte di Cassazione. For the assessment of statelessness it is not necessary to establish that the individual is not a national of any State. Rather, it is sufficient to establish that the individual is not a national of one of the countries with which he or she has significant links. To that end, the trial court must take into account the need to mitigate the burden of proof on the person concerned. With reference to the prohibition on the expulsion of stateless persons guaranteed by Article 31 of the New York Convention, it should be stressed that the importance of such a provision can be appreciated considering that it represents an exception to the general rule under international law according to which every State has, in principle, the right to expel at any moment an alien from its territory.18 However, according to the aforementioned Article 31, the prohibition on expulsion only applies when the stateless person is lawfully on the State’s territory. In fact, if the stateless person has been admitted to or legalized on the State’s territory, he or she is entitled to stay in that country 18 This principle has been affirmed by the International Law Commission in Article 3 of the Draft Articles on the Expulsion of Aliens. See the text of the Draft Articles with commentaries (2014) in Report of the International Law Commission on the work of its sixtysixth session, 2014, UN Doc. A/69/10, p. 22 ff. With reference to the general freedom of States to decide on the expulsion of aliens from their territory and the limits to that discretion under international law, see also for further references Di Filippo, “L’allontanamento dell’individuo straniero”, in Calamia et al. (eds.), Lineamenti di diritto internazionale ed europeo delle migrazioni, Milano, 2021, p. 237 ff. The Italian Review of International and Comparative Law 2 (2022) 154–162