Statelessness At Home 111 2.2 Hanna’s Experiences with Authorities Complicating her story, Hanna is currently registered in the Municipal Basic Administration (GBA) as being of ‘unknown nationality’. As mentioned, the municipal officials claim that Hanna cannot be considered stateless due to lack of sufficient evidence of this (yet they have also not deemed to register her as Vietnamese). This bureaucratic issue is a significant problem. If her nationality was to be registered as stateless in the GBA she would have had the right to acquire Dutch nationality through facilitated naturalisation.7 On their part, the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service (IND) persistently state that Hanna is considered to be a Vietnamese national pursuant to the Vietnamese nationality law, regardless of the evidence to the contrary provided by the Vietnamese authorities. According to the IND, the earlier mentioned letter of the Vietnamese Embassy does not confirm whether Hanna is or is not a Vietnamese national as it only stated that her claim to be recognized as a Vietnamese national was not evidenced sufficiently by documentary proof. Looking at responses of the Vietnamese Embassy to Hanna’s efforts in acquiring Vietnamese nationality, she has no perspective of obtaining Vietnamese nationality nor receiving a written statement of the Embassy officials in which an explanation is given why she cannot be considered as a Vietnamese national. Instead, Hanna’s statelessness remains unacknowledged, her ‘unknown nationality’ masking her true status and leaving her in limbo. To be recognised as stateless in the GBA or by the IND would break the vicious circle Hanna currently finds herself in by not being able to be naturalized in the Netherlands because she cannot prove that she never acquired or is able to renounce Vietnamese nationality. 2.3 Hanna’s Experiences Living in the Netherlands Hanna has always been protected by her parents as much as possible to avoid stressful situations in relation to her legal status as a foreigner and feelings of insecurity while being in the process of applying for a residence permit. Hanna did not talk much about her own situation until she gained a better understanding of statelessness after she attended a lecture on the topic by Laura van Waas, manager and founder of the Statelessness Programme at Tilburg Law School. After this lecture, Hanna was inspired to write her bachelor thesis on statelessness and did a great job in researching and writing on 7 To naturalise as a stateless person requires three years, instead of five years, of legal stay, in addition to a number of integration requirements e.g. assimilation into Dutch society and reasonable knowledge of the Dutch language. Dutch Nationality Act (Rijkswet op het Nederlanderschap), Article 8(4). tilburg law review 19 (2014) 108-116