CHAPTER I CHAPTER II Thunder Bay, northern Ontario, which operates with Legal Aid funding, provides legal assistance and advice to local residents in need, including many Indigenous people. Reasons Indigenous people may not have a birth certificate include, inter alia, cost, bureaucratic procedures, missing information or documents and mental health issues. The past treatment of Indigenous people, including the separation of Indigenous children from their families, continues to have an impact. The identity details of many Indigenous children were recorded incorrectly, and it can be difficult and time-consuming to correct such mistakes. In 2012, the Clinic initiated an identity document project “Awenen Niin” (“Who Am I?”), funded through a Local Poverty Reduction Fund. Among other activities, they have hosted sessions to help vulnerable clients gather required information and apply for personal identity documents and made referrals to community and governmental services as needed. In 2015, the project set up an “ID Bank” to securely store identity documents for clients who are at heightened risk of losing their identity documents (due to precarious housing, mental illness or other factors).134 CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V The impact of good practices in birth registration Canada’s nearly universal birth registration, combined with birthright citizenship, has prevented large numbers of people being born stateless in Canada. CHAPTER VI Czechia Population overview ANNEXES 53 RECOMMENDATIONS 134 Chris Sanders and Kristin Burnett, A Case Study in Personal Identification and Social Determinants of Health: Unregistered Births among Indigenous People in Northern Ontario, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(4), 567, 16 February 2019; K. Burnett et al., A call to action. 135 Note however, that only some categories of regularly staying stateless persons are counted in these statistics. UNHCR’s Refugee Data Finder. 136 UNHCR’s Refugee Data Finder; see also Faces of Statelessness in the Czech Republic, UNHCR, December 2020; and see ENS and OPU, Toolkit to identify and address statelessness in Czechia, pp. 26-28. CHAPTER VII Statelessness in Czechia is primarily linked to migration. According to statistics from the Ministry of Interior, there were 588 recorded stateless people and people with undetermined nationality in the country as of end-2024.135 Stateless people in Czechia originate from various places, including from the former Yugoslavia and former Soviet Union.136