Statelessness in the European Union With nationality and citizenship denoting two separate things, for the purposes of this contribution and in line with broader scholarship, it becomes possible to explore additional avenues for addressing the consequences of statelessness. Rather than the state being the only actor capable of granting citizenship, which is what happens when nationality and citizenship are conflated, actors such as the EU could be granted opportunities as well. 27 In light of this, one could hypothetically extend the conceptual distinction between nationality and citizenship to the institution of EU citizenship, which would come to resemble a citizenship that is no longer dependent on Member State nationality. 28 As is demonstrated below, in exploring the hypothetical value of EU citizenship for stateless persons, the EU is capable of fulfilling its promise to ‘place the individual at the heart of its activities’ and uphold its founding values of respect for ‘human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity’ 29 by extending the ratione personae of EU citizenship. In doing so, this article explores not only the value of EU citizenship as it stands right now, but also of what it might and perhaps should be in the future. STATELESSNESS IN THE EU AND THE POTENTIAL VALUE OF EU CITIZENSHIP A Numbers and Causes Statelessness continues to be an invisible problem, with the people affected by it generally being described as ‘legal ghosts’. 30 They are typically invisible within the (legal) framework of the state, as they are not regarded a member of the national community. Because of this, as well as other issues, gathering reliable data on stateless populations remains problematic. Nevertheless, it is estimated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that of the roughly 530,000 stateless persons currently living in Europe, EU Member States are home to approximately 400,000 stateless persons. 31 This means that around 75 per cent of the stateless persons living in Europe reside in an EU Member State. The general causes of statelessness are manifold, but in the EU, it most notably results from state succession, migration, and conflicts of nationality laws. These are shortly discussed below. 27 28 29 30 31 This is demonstrated in more detail in Part III. There has been some careful academic consideration of the value of a revised form of EU citizenship. See, eg, Dora Kostakopoulou, ‘European Union Citizenship: Writing the Future’ (2007) 13(5) European Law Journal 623; Oliver Garner, ‘The Existential Crisis of Citizenship of the European Union: The Argument for an Autonomous Status’ (2018) 20 Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies 116. EU Charter (n 2) preamble 2. Tamás Molnár, ‘Remembering the Forgotten: International Legal Regime Protecting the Stateless Persons — Stocktaking and New Tendencies’ (2014) 11(1) US–China Law Review 822. UNHCR Table 7 (n 3). It is relevant to note that UNHCR’s estimates are politicised in nature, and may therefore not reflect the true number of stateless persons within the EU. Other sources, such as the European Network on Statelessness and the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, provide estimates of the number of stateless persons in Europe as high as 600,000. See No Child Should Be Stateless (Report, European Network on Statelessness 2015) 1 <https://www.statelessness.eu/sites/www.statelessness.eu/files/ENS_NoChildStateless_final .pdf>; Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless (Wolf Legal Publishers 2014) 73. 29