V. BACKGROUND PAPER OHCHR The legal status for stateless persons in the Middle East and North Africa This summary distils the preliminary conclusions resulting from a longer legal review of legislative texts relevant to statelessness in Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, Kuwait the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. It aims to shed light on the level of their compatibility with international conventions and treaties relating to reduction or prevention of statelessness and the human rights of stateless persons. This paper has been drafted at the initiative of OHCHR, to inform discussions during the regional expert meeting on statelessness convened jointly by UNHCR and OHCHR (18-19 February 2010, Amman). The research was conducted by Jean Akl, Attorney at Law and consultant with OHCHR. The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of UNHCR or OHCHR. The study was not designed to be academic but rather policy-oriented, aiming to provide an understanding of the manner in which national legislators have dealt with the stateless populations in their respective countries. The longer study, still in progress, additionally aims to identify gaps in local laws, and to facilitate a pragmatic assessment of the legal environment within which future strategies and approaches to the reduction and prevention of statelessness and the enjoyment of fundamental human rights by stateless persons. According to the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, a stateless individual is “a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law “. UNHCR refers to two types of stateless: de jure statelessness, i.e. those who are not legally recognized as citizens in their country of residence or elsewhere and thus have no legal link to a state, and de facto stateless, or those who have legal claims for nationality but because of circumstances such as lack of documentation, proof, or loss of legal link, have in fact no effective link to their original state of nationality. Nationality is acquired by birth in a country (Jus Soli), birth to a national of a country (Jus Sanguinis) or through naturalization through periods of residency, marriage or other criteria, such as doing service to a nation, in accordance with national laws. Causes of statelessness differ and include being born to stateless parents, problems relating to state succession, failure to adequately apply for a nationality, laws that do not allow passing of nationality women if the father is not a national, being a refugee who loses an effective link with the country of origin, being of an internationally non-recognized state, renunciation of citizenship without the acquisition of another, difference between nationality laws, and others. 30