4 Analysis from the East-West Center system of fixed territorial links struggle to capture the particularities of such populations, who have lived mobile lifestyles for centuries.19 As a result of their past or present mobile lifestyle and ongoing discrimination, many Moken and Bajau Laut communities are not recognized as citizens by the states on whose territory they live.20 Inadequate legal safeguards. Laws in many states in the region have insufficient safeguards to prevent legal identity problems or statelessness. This is especially true of nationality laws. Many states’ laws permit loss or withdrawal of nationality on various grounds, including provisions allowing citizens to voluntarily renounce their citizenship even if they are rendered stateless. This has caused statelessness in cross-border marriages, such as those between Vietnamese women and foreign men coming mainly from East Asia. Many Vietnamese brides became stateless when they had to renounce their own citizenship in order to acquire the nationality of their foreign husbands, but failed to attain a new nationality.21 Children are disproportionately affected by inadequate legal safeguards, more so if the parents are unknown. Protections for foundlings is absent in the nationality laws of a number of countries in the region.22 The Thai government has committed to achieving ‘zero statelessness’ and the Philippines has launched a National Action Plan to end statelessness by 2024. However, other governments remain reluctant to take action Responses to Statelessness and Other Legal Identity Problems Large populations without access to their full social, political, and economic rights present significant challenges to governance, social cohesion, and development. Some governments in Southeast Asia are gradually recognizing the problem.23 For instance, in 2016, the Thai government expressed its commitment to achieving the goal of “zero statelessness” and, in 2017, the Philippines launched a National Action Plan to end statelessness by 2024. However, other governments remain reluctant to take action. Given the low accession rates to the statelessness conventions as well as the lack of enforceable regional frameworks addressing statelessness, much of the heavy lifting to solve the problem will have to be done at the country level. Policy responses of states in the region have focused on identifying affected persons, improving civil registration, law reforms, facilitating naturalization, and building new digital identification systems. Identifying affected individuals and groups. Data on stateless persons or those without proof of legal identity are hard to come by due to, among other factors, lack of commonly agreed definitions, logistical barriers, or simply lack of political will to address the problem. This leads to insufficient or inaccurate statistical information and impedes the formulation of effective policies. Yet, there are also positive examples in the region, such as Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia, where both government and NGO-led initiatives to identify stateless or at-risk persons led to an improvement in the level of data on affected populations. In 2005, the Thai government adopted the “National Strategy on Administration of Legal Status and the Rights of Persons” with the objective of ensuring that non-nationals obtain a legal status. The strategy covered both long-term resident stateless populations and undocumented migrant workers. Together with an amendment to the civil registration act, in 2008, this now allows stateless or undocumented persons to be recorded by the authorities and issued an identity document, which enables them to access basic rights such as health care. For undocumented migrant workers and their children, Thailand established a cross-border nationality verification scheme in cooperation with countries of origin, especially Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Myanmar.24 The Philippines offers another example of cross-border collaboration on identifying stateless populations. There, the government, in partnership with the Indonesian government, carried out a mapping exercise, from 2012 to 2014, to resolve the citizenship status of thousands of long-term residents of Indonesian descent. By 2019, more than 90 percent of the 8,745 registered individuals had their citizenship confirmed.25 The Philippines has also established, in 2012, a statelessness determination procedure. As the only state in the region thus far to have established such a mechanism, it enables the identification and recognition of stateless individuals, in accordance with the country’s