3. ENSURING THAT TODAY’S REFUGEES ARE NOT TOMORROW’S STATELESS: SOLUTIONS IN A REFUGEE CONTEXT States to offer a protective umbrella, identifying persons in need and exercising diplomatic functions where necessary. For Rwandan refugees in Uganda, however, the official policy response to their plight continues to lack effective recognition of the genuine protection concerns that are preventing them from accessing meaningful citizenship. At the same time, the appropriate alternative in these circumstances – the granting and enjoyment of refugee status as an effective bridge to the three durable solutions – is in practice and policy being denied through the way in which cessation is playing out. In other words, the circumstances in which these refugees find themselves can be described as a situation in which they are being denied effective citizenship. They are not only being denied effective national protection, but also most of the rights concomitant with refugee status, the international protective “citizenship” which is intended to create a path to the ultimate re-establishment of a viable State-citizen link. As a result, many of the refugees saw themselves as stateless, although certainly they are not so de jure – yet. Creating a situation in which people have incentives to become officially “invisible” is a recipe for risk of statelessness. For instance, many have had to destroy documentation that proves their status in order to remain under the legal radar. As a result, those who are “invisible” are unlikely to register their children at birth as they have no status against which to register them and even if they manage to hold onto a nationality, their children are certainly vulnerable to being stateless. Ultimately, greater recognition is needed of the fact that today’s protracted refugees are at risk of becoming tomorrow’s stateless unless a deliberate effort is made to avert this from happening. By ensuring that appropriate alternatives are offered to those who cannot return “home”, future situations of statelessness can be averted. Of course, this solution relies on the goodwill of governments to offer citizenship to those who originally arrived as refugees – or whose parents did. It is also important to nuance this discussion by drawing attention to the fact that there is a balancing act between pushing for naturalisation on the basis of irreconcilable citizenship problems, and undermining the hope or possibility of return by too readily assessing people as stateless. Suffice it to say, however, that governments need to be persuaded that it is in their best interest from an economic and security perspective to give legal recognition to those living within 88