130 Swider and den Heijer an area without border controls, decisions on the residence of third-country nationals, including stateless persons, taken by one Member State may have effects on other Member States. As explained above, Member States’ practices and legislation display considerable differences in the treatment of stateless persons. This may have undesirable cross-border effects which can be countered by a common framework for the identification and protection of stateless persons. Although one may argue that addressing protection gaps in the 1954 Convention falls primarily to the parties to the 1954 Convention rather than the EU, it is to be observed that non-EU state parties do not necessarily have an interest in harmonizing their implementation of the 1954 Convention to the same extent as EU state parties—precisely because they do not partake in the Union area of free movement. 6 Proposal for an EU Directive The legislative act we propose should set out common goals in the field of identifying stateless persons as well as their standard of treatment that all EU countries must achieve. It would be up to the individual Member States to ensure that their national laws meet those goals. Although recent experiences with secondary migration of asylum seekers prompted the European Commission to issue proposals to transform the asylum directives into regulations,108 in respect of statelessness a directive would probably be a suitable legal act. Below, we explain what the key legal elements of such a directive would be. It is neither useful nor necessary at this stage to go into each and every legislative detail. Yet we do outline the issues that need to be addressed at the very least and how, in our view, the most critical issues should be resolved. 6.1 Statelessness Determination Procedure An obligation on all Member States to have in place an accessible and fair procedure for the determination of statelessness would greatly improve the legal position of stateless persons in many Member States. As noted above, a determination of statelessness is a logical prerequisite for invoking the rights set out in the 1954 Convention. Just as in the asylum context, a determination of the status of stateless person is necessary for a person to be granted protection, including legal 108  C OM(2016) 466 final; COM(2016) 467 final. European Journal of Migration and Law 19 (2017) 101–135