standards/practices, de jure and de facto stateless persons should be properly defined. All officers concerned with stateless issues should be provided with appropriate guidance and training regarding the concept and determination of statelessness. Nurturing inter-state cooperation is indispensable when determining statelessness. The UNHCR, mandated to prevent and reduce statelessness and to protect stateless persons can assist States in their cooperation to establish a person’s nationality status. Relevant information is also made available through UNHCR’s database Refworld. It should be stressed that Inter-state cooperation in no way threatens the privacy and safety of stateless persons who seek refugee status. Secondly, information necessary to fully grasp the issue of statelessness in Japan has yet to be compiled. As reliable comprehensive data is lacking, it is not possible to precisely set forth the demographic profile of stateless persons in Japan.159 A national survey should be conducted in full cooperation with local governments, relevant NGOs and the UNHCR, which would enable one to identify the magnitude of the problem of statelessness. The data to be collected should cover such matters as: reasons for and duration of statelessness, their demographic profile disaggregated by, among others, sex, age, national/social origin or other status as well as their legal and socio-economic situations. Attempts have been made to look into the matter through public organizations such as child consultation centers. However, undocumented immigrants tend to distance themselves from authorities, which results in the full picture never being portrayed. With respect to children not registered at birth, their legal existence has not been verified and accordingly, a national survey should be conducted immediately and this issue should be solved by applying any means necessary Parents fail to register births because of lack of information, fear of being discovered as an undocumented resident, and in some cases refusal of the hospital to issue a birth certificate. Immediate registration after birth is a right protected under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Japan has voluntarily accepted this obligation as a signatory. 159 It is noted that the breakdown of foreigners by nationality in the most recent National Census (2005) categorized as many as 119,280 persons for the group of “stateless or not reported” while the number of stateless persons registered as aliens in 2006 was 1717. See National Census of 2005, available at http://www.e-stat.go.jp/SG1/estat/List.do?lid=000001029028; Statistical Data on Registered Aliens, 2006, available at http://www.moj.go.jp/TOUKEI/ichiran/touroku.html. 60