legal status are thus not included in the official number of stateless persons in Lithuania.23 The official annual reports of respectively the Statistics Department and the Migration Department as well as additional information provided by the representatives of the Ministry of the Interior to the author of the study are the key sources of data referred to in the present report. Additional inquiries into the methodology behind the figures were also made by the author in all meetings with national authorities held in the course of the study. 2.1.1 Historical background On 16 February 1918, Lithuania declared independence. It adopted the Provisional Law on Citizenship of Lithuania on 9 January 1919. Article 1 of the Provisional Law stated that those considered to be citizens of Lithuania were (1) persons whose parents and grandparents had resided in Lithuania for some time and who had either always lived in Lithuania or had returned to live there; (2) persons who had resided in Lithuania for at least ten years before 1914 and either owned property or had a permanent job; (3) children of a citizen of Lithuania; (4) wives and widows of a citizen of Lithuania; (5) children of an unmarried Lithuanian citizen if they had not been adopted by a foreign national; (6) aliens who were newly accepted as citizens of Lithuania through the process of naturalization. This law was valid for more than two decades before a Law on Citizenship was adopted on 8 August 1939. The Department of Citizens’ Protection summarized the practice of the application of the Provisional Law to the Minister of Interior in 1929 as follows: “as conferring of citizenship upon a foreigner is in part a question of personal discretion, apart from the fulfilling of the conditions outlined in the law, the person concerned should know the Lithuanian language, be loyal and should not be Polish or German.”24 There is no information available on the issue of statelessness stemming from that time, yet historical research suggests that German and Polish minorities faced significant obstacles in acquiring Lithuanian citizenship through naturalization.25 Likewise, no information is available on the citizenship of the Roma population from 1919 to 1940, but some members of this community have reported that many Roma habitual residents of Lithuania were not even registered as such until the Soviet authorities forcibly settled them in 1956.26 During these two decades of statehood, the body of citizens of Lithuania was defined. The 1939 Law on Citizenship confirmed the principles that had emerged in the country’s citizenship policy, laid out in the provisions of its 1922, 1928 and 1938 Constitutions. The principle of jus sanguinis applied as a general rule, and jus soli only applied to foundlings. A prohibition of dual citizenship was also introduced into the national law. Article 11(5) of the 1939 Law on Citizenship mentioned the concept of statelessness, albeit only in passing. This article stated that in order to be eligible for naturalization, the applicant had to be “stateless or a citizen of a state, under the operation of whose laws, he would automatically lose its citizenship by becoming a citizen of Lithuania”, but no definition of a “stateless person” was provided. In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed the Republic of Lithuania, which soon was renamed and restructured into the Lithuanian SSR. The new Constitution, adopted on 25 August 1940, declared every citizen of the 23 These groups are defined and explained further in the study (section 2.2.2.). 24 Sinkevičius, V., Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybė 1918-2001 metais / Citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania 1918-2001. Vilnius: Teisinės informacijos centras, 2002, p. 50. 25 Sinkevičius, V., Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybė 1918-2001 metais / Citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania 1918-2001. Vilnius: Teisinės informacijos centras, 2002, p. 50; recited in: Kūris, E. “Country Report: Lithuania”, EUDO Citizenship Observatory Country Reports, 2010, p. 1, 5. 26 Toleikis, V. Nazi occupation 1941-1944. The Holocaust and other Nazi crimes.Persecution of non-Jews. Lithuanian Gypsies during the years of Nazi occupation, 2002, p. 3; Simoniuškytė, A., The Roma of Seredžius, 2003, 864. The issue has been emphasized by all Roma participants in this study and Kazimeras, a Roma rights activist during an interview on 29 August 2012. The difficulty in documenting non-sedentary Roma populations was acknowledged by Vytautas Toleikis, historian specializing in Jewish and Roma populations in Lithuania, interviewed by phone on 6 September 2012. U N H C R S TO C K H O L M , M AY 2 0 1 6 15