The determination of statelessness 127 national and cultural community. Therefore, stateless persons’ access to nationality should be facilitated in various ways, such as reducing the minimum waiting period, fees and administrative obstacles.38 The same five-step model can – with some adaptations – be used in situations where stateless persons reside in their ‘own country’. The main necessary modification will be that identification would be followed immediately by naturalization or recognition of nationality, instead of the granting of a protection status. 5.4. Statelessness determination Determining statelessness is somewhat similar to proving the existence of an ‘invisible’ particle in physics. Its ‘presence’ as such may be impossible to demonstrate – as one needs to prove a negative (‘not considered a national of any State under the operation of law’)39 – but identifying the interaction it has with the environment can fulfil the same purpose. Literally speaking, establishing statelessness means proving that someone is not a national of any of the world’s nearly two hundred states. This would be an incredibly lengthy and cumbersome (or largely impossible) endeavour. Yet statelessness determination remains an indispensable cornerstone of any statelessness protection mechanism, as already described, and it also plays a crucial role in prevention and reduction measures. Luckily, practice demonstrates that statelessness can be realistically identified through its impact on certain aspects of the person’s life, and there are simple methods to reduce the scope of examination to a realistic level. The following parts outline the framework for statelessness determination and the main challenges related thereto. 5.4.1 Access to statelessness determination Protection mechanisms have no actual impact if those in need of protection are prevented from accessing them. Practice shows that protectionoriented asylum regulations, facilitated naturalization mechanisms and progressive frameworks offering protection to victims of domestic violence too often remain promises on paper, as the machinery that would give access to them is ineffective. These protection mechanisms are like 38 39 See 1954 Convention, Art. 32. 1954 Convention, Art. 1(1). See Chapter 3 in this volume by van Waas on the UN statelessness conventions. 9781107032446c05_p116-143.indd 127 6/16/2014 3:12:02 PM