7. Naturalisation The Contracting State shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of stateless persons. The State shall in particular make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings including reduction of charges and costs wherever possible. 8. Dispute settlement All disputes between States parties which cannot be settled by other means may be referred to the International Court of Justice at the request of a party to the dispute. 9. Reservations In acknowledgement of special conditions prevailing in their respective States at the time of ratification or accession, the Convention allows Contracting States to make reservations to certain of its provisions. Regulations may be made with respect to any of the Convention’s provisions with the exception of those which the drafters of the Convention determined to be of a fundamental nature. No reservations may be made, therefore, in the cases of Articles 1 (definition/exclusion), 3 (non-discrimination), 4 (freedom of religion), 16(1) (free access to courts) and 33 to 42 (Final Clauses). 10. Final act The Final Act recommends that each Contracting State, when it recognises as valid the reasons for which a person has renounced the protection of the State of which he is a national, consider sympathetically the possibility of according to the person the treatment which the Convention accords to stateless persons. This recommendation was included on behalf of de facto stateless persons who, technically, still held a nationality but did not receive any of the benefits generally associated with nationality, such as diplomatic protection. 3.2 Analysis of the provisions in the 1954 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and legislation of the Kyrgyz Republic 3.2.1 Definition of a stateless person Article 3 of the Law On Citizenship of the Kyrgyz Republic gives the following definition of a stateless person: A stateless person is a person who is not a citizen of the Kyrgyz Republic and does not have evidence of affiliation with citizenship of another state. In general, this definition overlaps with the definition in the Convention, of a person who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law. The status of citizen under the operation of law means that this person is automatically considered a citizen under the operation of law as formulated in the laws in force in the state with regard to issues of citizenship, or that citizenship was granted to that person based on a decision made by a competent authority. Persons who did not receive the citizenship of any State automatically or on the basis of an individual decision in accordance with the law of the relevant State, are considered stateless persons de jure. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, a person is considered to have a citizenship. However, sometimes states cannot come to a decision about which of them should grant a person its citizenship. Such a person cannot demonstrate that de jure s/he does not have citizenship, but s/he does not have Small Changes ‫ ـ‬Big Gains: An Action Plan to Prevent and Reduce Statelessness in the Kyrgyz Republic 38