A quick look through the statistical profile of the detained, de jure or de facto stateless persons demonstrates that the majority of them are from former USSR republics: Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Georgia (Table 1). The great majority of them (92 per cent) were born before 1991, i.e. at the time of their birth they were Soviet citizens with USSR passports. Like Mr Mskhiladze, a proportion of them were already in Russia at the time of the dissolution of the USSR, but for one reason or another, they did not manage to secure Russian citizenship. Exploring the relationship between de jure and de facto statelessness Conceptually, de jure statelessness refers to ‘a person not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’ (according to the 1954 UN Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons). De facto statelessness has not been legally defined; the closest formal definition comes from UNHCR’s policy paper denoting ‘persons outside the country of their nationality who are unable or, for valid reasons, are unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country’ (Massey 2010: 61). In the literature, de facto statelessness has been used to refer to a situation where the nationality status is simply not known (White 2009), to refer to a state of ineffective nationality (Kingston 2014, Parsons & Lawreniuk 2018), to denote the condition shared by some undocumented migrants (Blitz & OteroIglesias, 2011), or some refugees (Gruberg 2011). What is the relationship between de jure and de facto statelessness from a rightsbased perspective? While de jure statelessness arguably denotes the most extreme position in the constellation of the different legal statuses, rights and belongings that the literature came to recently call ‘the assemblage of noncitizenship’ (Landolt & Goldring, 2015), the number of the international human rights protections afforded to de jure stateless is arguably higher than to those in de facto statelessness. It is a status well protected in international law (two 8