THEMATIC BRIEFING | SEPTEMBER 2021 Statelessness determination and protection in Europe 27 assessment of statelessness and provides no route to regularisation and protection for those without a residence permit. The UN Human Rights Committee recently found that the Dutch Government’s failure to identify and assess a child’s statelessness led to a violation of their right to a nationality.79 (iv) Statelessness status without an SDP In Albania and Serbia, a statelessness status is established in law, granting some specific rights to stateless people. However, there is no procedure to determine or regulate this status or statelessness determination is only done in ad hoc and time-specific procedures, so stateless people on the territory face significant barriers to accessing the rights they are due under national and international law. There has been some tentative recent progress towards introducing SDPs in some Index countries. In the Netherlands, draft legislative proposals have been pending for several years, and were revised and laid before Parliament in December 2020, but the legislative proposal still does not provide for a statelessness status nor residence rights as a consequence of statelessness determination. In Albania, a draft law establishing an SDP was laid before Parliament in early 2021. In Malta, following accession to the 1954 Convention in 2019, discussions are ongoing between the Government, UNHCR and civil society towards establishing an SDP. During the Global Refugee Forum in December 2019, Portugal pledged to ‘establish mechanisms to identify, protect, prevent and reduce statelessness in Portugal’ and to ‘provide for the issuance of Convention travel documents for refugees and stateless persons according to international standards’.80