who are unable to access documentation will often require assistance in accessing their legal rights, either as a citizen or as a stateless person. Such clients will ordinarily not identify their problem as one of access to nationality or statelessness, but rather as inability to access a birth certificate, an identity document, a passport, social services or economic participation. The task of a legal practitioner or social worker to assist such persons is challenging on many levels. There is a marked lack of understanding of the problem of statelessness amongst the state authorities who are best positioned to prevent or reduce it. Statelessness is a little-known concept even in the human rights field. Further, few legal mechanisms exist to cope with stateless persons in South Africa, as in most African countries. In absence of signature and ratification of the UN statelessness treaties or a dedicated domestic legal framework, assisting a person who is stateless is therefore a daunting task that requires the creative use of a combination of international customary law or jus cogens,2 human rights law and principles, and South African constitutional law, citizenship and immigration law and administrative law. Having identified this legal vacuum, Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) launched a Statelessness Project in March 2011. This guide was drafted with the intention to aid other attorneys, paralegals and social workers in promoting access to citizenship and combating statelessness on our territory. The guide is a compendium of lessons learned in our effort to assist clients in accessing nationality. It is by no means a complete and fixed composition; it is a work in progress that will be updated over time with relevant legislation, policy and practice. LHR is hopeful that this guide will assist in demystifying the current legal framework as it relates to questions of nationality and statelessness, and will provide us all with the tools to play an active role in the ongoing reform of this field of law. The guide begins in section 2 by defining some relevant concepts and terms in the field of citizenship and statelessness. Section 3 outlines the international and South African laws that can be used to resolve clients’ problems. Section 4 takes you step-by-step through how to assess a client’s citizenship or stateless status, with the ultimate goal of making a plan of action to resolve the client’s problem. Section 5 is broken up into specific populations of concern and focuses on the solutions available to resolve your client’s problem. 2 2 Jus cogens (from Latin: compelling law; English: peremptory norm) refers to certain fundamental, overriding principles of international law, from which no derogation is ever permitted. http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/jus_cogens (accessed 9 September 2013). Promoting citizenship and preventing statelessness in South Africa: A practitioner’s guide