Litigation Toolkit on Statelessness: Volume I October 2022 of providing a legal avenue to achieve clearer, more comprehensive and concrete standards on the protection of stateless persons and prevention of statelessness. Impact litigation has the advantage of documenting injustices and legally challenging issues that may not be widely known, understood, or even visible. The negative impact of statelessness is often invisible or, as a result of the precarious legal status or the ‘limbo’ in which stateless persons live, stateless persons are forgotten even in issues and debates that directly affect them. Impact litigation has been used to help achieve important societal change in many countries, including to abolish slave trade in Britain, to force racially segregated schools that segregated students on racial or ethnic grounds to desegregate in the United States of America and in Europe. In these examples, and in many instances, litigation was an important part of a wider effort to bring change.8 2.2. Prioritisation and identification of cases One of the first steps in any impact litigation work is to have a clear understanding of the issues and areas of law that are a priority for your work. For example, this may include cases concerning protection of stateless persons, asylum, acquisition or deprivation of nationality, childhood statelessness, birth registration, detention of stateless persons, or discriminatory treatment leading to statelessness. An overview of key international and regional jurisprudence on these topics is provided in Volume II of this toolkit. These priorities should fall within the litigator’s area of expertise and they should have a clear understanding of the legal issues in the case. This is crucial as one of the considerations of impact litigation is that your knowledge, experience, and ability to bring issues to the attention of courts and other international mechanisms will bring added value to a particular case. This is especially important when litigating on issues such as statelessness, which are not often addressed by courts and in impact litigation. Identifying cases for potential litigation requires legal professionals to actively seek out and monitor ongoing or recent cases that fall within the scope of their priorities. For example, it is possible to monitor cases communicated by the European Court of Human Rights, United Nations Treaty Bodies, and the Court of Justice of the European Union, as well as cases brought at a national level. Legal practitioners who provide legal advice and assistance to stateless persons (or to populations who may be affected by statelessness) should also regularly consider whether there are cases within their casework that reflect a wider trend, systematic issue or that highlight a protection gap, and whether those cases could become strategic. It is important to note that actively seeking out a case is different to a phenomenon witnessed in several European jurisdictions consisting of practitioners qualified abroad bringing a case before the courts of a jurisdiction they are not familiar with, without prior knowledge of the See more examples of impact litigation at Public Law Project, Guide to Strategic Litigation: https://publiclawproject.org.uk/content/uploads/data/resources/153/40108-Guide-to-Strategic-Litigationlinked-final_1_8_2016.pdf 8 8