obtaining a passport in terms of the future realization of their rights. Poverty frequently does not allow Romani people to pay for the services of a professional lawyer or attorney, while access to free legal assistance at state centers (regarding protecting and representing people’s interests in courts, at other state agencies, and so forth, drafting procedural documents) is limited, since Roma people cannot prove they have the right to this assistance because they lack documents (recipients of assistance are determined by law87). The fact that a child’s status is dependent on their parents’ citizenship also leads to an increase in incidences of statelessness among people in other vulnerable categories, like homeless people who have been released from prison. Even people who have been living a fully integrated life in Ukraine for years suffer from this defect in the law: M.A. was born in Kiev in 1998. She had health problems at the time of her birth and required a complicated operation. Her mother, M.E., has no citizenship: not of Kazakhstan, where she was born, nor of Russia, where she lived for a time, nor of Ukraine as the country were she resided for over 25 years. M.E. lost contact with her child’s father and had to think about how to support and get treatment for her daughter. Around 2001, M.E. lost all her documents, including her Soviet passport. She was not able to have her documents reissued. After many appeals to state agencies, Ukraine’s State Migration Service responded that there was no legally recognized procedure to declare M.E. a stateless person or issue the document of a stateless person to confirm her legal status. Her daughter M.A. is currently 20. Before she reached the age of 18, M.A. was not able to obtain a passport because her mother lacked documents. Under Ukrainian law, people born in Ukraine to stateless persons living legally in Ukraine are citizens of Ukraine by birth. However, M.E. did not have any identity documents at the time of M.A.’s birth, let alone documents confirming the lawfulness of her stay in Ukraine. Thus, M.A. found herself in a legal vacuum: without identity documents, she could not obtain a degree, work legally, register a marriage, and so forth. In the future, M.A.’s unregulated legal status will be handed down to her children, giving rise to future cases of statelessness. The Roma population has similar problems with documentation in Russia, since the Russian government has not taken systemic positive measures to improve the situation of this ethnic minority. This situation becomes critical when the problems of 87 Law of Ukraine “On Free Legal Assistance,” https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/ show/3460-17 48