334 R. Vecellio Segate citizens according to the law of at least one State, but whose citizenship is not recognised or declared by any documents possessed by such individuals (Massey 2010; Sawyer 2011).11 Nonetheless, it is not a “developing world”-problem only. In Canada, for instance, several stateless persons face removal-aimed indefinite detention, with authorities being unable to either regularise their domestic status or justify their deportation to any specific safe and relevant place; this obviously takes a toll on these persons’ mental and physical health, let alone the capacity to plan anything close to a future (Kane 2019). Similar stories are shared by stateless individuals in the US, with each administration renewing their promise to legislate in the area but eventually failing to fulfil it (Ambartsoumian-Clough 2022). In the EU plus Norway alone, in 2018, there were nearly 400,000 stateless individuals (European Commission 2021, 1), and the UK is one but a few States in the European macroregion to have established a procedure for processing statelessness claims (Bianchini 2017, 86); this requires the claimant to have exhausted all applicable good-faith efforts to prove their identity and petition for relevant citizenships. As yet another example, Belarusian citizens living abroad become stateless when Belarus fails to renew their passports remotely while factually forcing them to stay abroad as they are persecuted by the authorities (Kolchyna 2023). Although a few States understand stateless individuals as lacking proof of citizenship, international law defines them more narrowly as lacking citizenship altogether, either because they were stripped of it by their State, or because they relinquished it themselves (Council of Europe 2021, 9).12 In fact, the main challenge here is that statelessness is often an informed, voluntary choice; this prompts ethical considerations around the suitability of deploying identity management systems for deliberately recording stateless individuals. Careful however that even they might long for an identity, and indeed have the right to acquire one: identity and citizenship are not necessarily coincident, meaning that one State might grant an individual an identity without making them a citizen. The 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, which despite the low ratification rate is widely considered customary law and as such binding on all States regardless of membership, declares at Article 27 that a stateless individual enjoys the right to identity documents (ibid., 3–4). This raises dilemmas as to the nature of such documents and their bureaucratic “interoperability” for several purposes (transnational criminal investigations, transnational tax governance, but also mere travelling): if they are not passports 11 For a couple of (minority, but representative) dissonant voices, check (The Equal Rights Trust 2010, 52–84; Tucker 2014). 12 Note that this source employed inaccurate terminology: “citizenship” should have been preferred in lieu of “nationality”.