Statelessness and the struggle to close the gap in human rights through legal empowerment: The Palermo Convention employed as a conduit Tanya Faye Herring, Bangor University Law School Doctoral Researcher, Wales, UK; Research Fellow, International Communities Organization (ICO), London, UK; Post-doctoral Researcher, The Wales Observatory on Human Rights of Children and Young People This article focuses on the legal empowerment of the stateless. The first part addresses the concept of legal empowerment and, through the case of the Lumad, explains how the law can be used to close the gap in human rights fulfillment for the stateless and other vulnerable populations. It then describes how the universal application of the Palermo Convention can become a prevention and protection resource for stateless populations, concluding that there must be precise and determined implementation of international law into the domestic sphere to close the gaps between human rights and the rule of law. Legal Empowerment Global legal empowerment has been described by Resolution 63/142 of the General Assembly’s final report of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor as the process whereby the poor are protected and enabled to use the law to effect systematic change, especially in the realms of economic growth and sustainable development. One of the greatest global human rights challenges to legal empowerment is poverty. However, poverty remains the nucleus of discrimination, insecurity, and social exclusion. Middlesex University’s Professor Blitz, who is a leading expert on statelessness, was commissioned to conduct one of the first economic studies that quantified the cost undertaken by a stateless person. The 2011 report investigated 980 stateless and former “poverty continues to have an adverse impact on the stateless and their access to education and healthcare” stateless from key regions in Bangladesh, Kenya, Slovenia, and Sri Lanka. The research outcomes indicated that a stateless person’s household income is 34% lower than a person who is not stateless. A substantial difference was found in home ownership where a stateless person is 60% less likely to own a home than those who are nonstateless. Consequently, using 2017-2018 economies, poverty continues to have an adverse impact on the stateless and their access to education and healthcare. http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 37