Statelessness in Czechia | January 2024 25 information about the procedure for determining statelessness to ensure access to the procedure and to prevent detention and/or forcible removal. It is also advisable for individuals to consider applying for both international protection and statelessness determination procedures. Statelessness determination is not an automatic process, and pursuing both options can provide the best chance for securing residence status and protection. Asylum registration and screening procedures and other procedures (and the people who work within them) should not assume that applicants have a nationality. Screening forms should include questions that will help to identify statelessness. Additional information about statelessness and asylum registration, refugee status determination, and detention is available on the Statelessness Journeys website and in the statelessness section of the EASO/EUAA Practical Guide on Registration: Lodging of applications for international protection. Example: for an overview of the asylum process and related procedures for a stateless person in the Netherlands, see Statelessness in the Netherlands: A Step by Step Guide [A practical guide for caseworkers in contact with stateless persons in the Netherlands] (ASKV Refugee Support, ISI, ENS, 2018) and What a Judge Cannot See: Statelessness Determination in the Netherlands (2023). Stateless people often face a heightened risk of arbitrary detention, particularly where procedural safeguards to identify and determine statelessness are lacking. Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantee the right to liberty and prohibit unlawful and arbitrary detention. Any deprivation of liberty must be necessary, reasonable, and proportionate in the circumstances, and it must comply with domestic and international law. Detention must be used as a measure of last resort and is justified only when other less invasive measures are not sufficient to achieve legitimate aims. Detainees must always have the right and access to judicial review and adequate legal advice. There should be maximum limits on the duration of detention, restrictions on multiple instances of detention, and limits on the cumulative length of time spent in detention. Stateless people often do not have a legal residence permit in any country and are detained for this reason in some countries. They are often also at heightened risk of prolonged arbitrary detention in relation to identification and removal procedures because they frequently lack identity documents and removal is often impossible (because stateless people are, by definition, not considered nationals of the proposed country of removal and often are not accepted for removal). UNHCR has called on States not to detain stateless persons on the sole basis of them being stateless. UNHCR’s Statelessness Handbook emphasises that, even when detention is justified, people awaiting statelessness determination must not be detained in the same spaces as convicted criminals or individuals awaiting trial. Statelessness determination procedures are an important mechanism to reduce the risk of prolonged and/or arbitrary detention. There must be mechanisms for detained people who are stateless or whose