Why Union Law Can And Should Protect Stateless Persons 113 nationality’,41 a figure which does not make its way into the UNHCR statistics. Moreover, none of these figures account for persons who have never enjoyed legal residence in the Netherlands, since they are not registered in the Dutch Registry at all. This illustrates that the figure from the Netherlands tells us very little about the actual number of stateless persons in that country—it might be either underestimating or overestimating the true number. It also transpires from UNHCR studies that Member States employ different techniques for collecting data,42 with them often being incomplete or inconsistent even within one state,43 and some Member States not collecting any statistical information on the number of stateless persons in their territories at all.44 It is beyond the scope of this paper to analyse how data is assembled in each Member State, but based on available studies, and taking account of the fact that adequate statelessness determination procedures are missing in a majority of EU Member States, it can be assumed that most figures circulating in the public domain are not representative, and that the scope of the statelessness phenomenon in the EU remains opaque. 3.2 Demographic Composition of EU’s Stateless Population Equally unfortunately, there is relatively little information available on profile of the stateless populations in the EU. With a view to provide some basic insight, however, and at risk of oversimplifying matters, it is possible to divide the stateless population into roughly three broad categories.45 A majority is formed by individuals who became stateless as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The largest group of stateless persons living in 41 According to the Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek (Dutch Central Statistics Office) there were 88,313 persons registered with ‘nationality unknown’ in 2012, as quoted in Adviescommissie Vreemdelingenzaken (ACVZ), Geen land te bekennen (Dutch Advisory Committee on Migration Affairs, ‘No country of one’s own’) Dec. 2013 (Den Haag, ACVZ, 2013), p. 31. Statistics until 2010 are available on the website of the Centraal Bureau voor Statistiek at http://statline.cbs.nl/, under ‘Bevolking: geslacht, leeftijd en nationaliteit. Cijfers van 1 januari 2010’. 42 Compare, for example, the UNHCR reports Mapping Statelessness in Belgium (Geneva, UNHCR, 2012), pp. 21–27; Mapping Statelessness in the Netherlands (Geneva, UNHCR, 2011), p. 17; and Mapping Statelessness in Finland (Geneva, UNHCR, 2014), pp. 14–22; and UNHCR, Global Trends 2013 (Geneva, UNHCR, 2014), data on stateless persons in Table 1 on pp. 40–44. 43  U NHCR, Mapping Statelessness in the UK (Geneva, UNHCR, 2011), pp. 28–54. 44 For example, Malta, see UNHCR, Mapping Statelessness in Malta (Geneva, UNHCR, 2014), pp. 46–47. 45 Cf. Manly, 2012, pp. 266–267. European Journal of Migration and Law 19 (2017) 101–135