306 Agata Szwed, Statelessness in the Context of the Migration Crisis in Europe: A Growing... their control (most often in order to improve their economic wellbeing), while refugees are sensu stricto understood as victims of persecution and sensu largo as victims of armed conflicts and other events that seriously disrupt public order.12 Refugees usually have preconditions for obtaining citizenship in a destination country that are different from those of regular migrants, and these two groups can make use of different sources of legal protection.13 Although the development of the international system for the protection of human rights is moving away from the principle that granting citizenship is the prerogative of states, not the right of the individual, stateless persons can be found in almost every country. They are exposed to danger and forced to live in conditions of constant discrimination and inequality in comparison with the citizens of the country in which they are located − they often face numerous difficulties, such as access to healthcare, to social assistance, the right to education or to legal employment, the right to acquire property, the right to marry and acquire a birth certificate for children. Their situation is also called ‘living in legal limbo’.14 There is an obvious contradiction between the mechanism of protecting human rights and ensuring equality resulting from human nature on the one hand, and the formalisation of national procedures for granting the right to citizenship on the other hand, discriminating the social position of persons without such citizenship. Hannah Arendt was among the first philosophers to observe that the terms ‘citizen’ and ‘human’ do not mean the same. Timeless human rights appear to be without protection at a time when it becomes impossible to defi ne them as the rights of a citizen of a given country. Arendt, starting from the state paradigm 12 The legal definition of a refugee (as a victim of persecution) is contained in Article 1 CRSR and all EU states are signatories to that convention. The extended definition is included especially in non-European acts of regional law and in the positions of international organisations specialising in helping refugees, such as UNHCR or UNRWA. See Glossary on Migration (International Organization for Migration 2019); Adrian Edwards, UNHCR viewpoint: ‘Refugee’ or ‘Migrant’ − Which Is Right? (UNHCR 2015) available at <https://www.unhcr. org/55df0e556.htm> accessed 8 August 2020. 13 Practically every national law regulates the granting of citizenship to refugees and migrants residing in the country in a different way, although some common standards of treatment for the two groups have been developed under the Common European Asylum System. See Sergio Carrera and Zvezda Vankova, Human Rights Aspects of Immigrant and Refugee Integration Policies (Council of Europe 2019); Inter-Parliamentary Union and UNHCR, Nationality and Statelessness. Handbook for Parliamentarians No 22 (Inter-Parliamentary Union with the UNHCR 2010); Rainer Bauböck and others, Access to Citizenship and Its Impact on Immigrant Integration (European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies 2013) 14 See Michael Leach and Fethi Mansouri, Lives in Limbo: Voices of Refugees Under Temporary Protection (University of New South Wales Press 2004).