2. The Sustainable Development Goals and solutions to statelessness The effects of statelessness caused by gender discrimination in nationality laws are numerous, severe and continuing and have a knock-on effect for the women, their children and families. These include: exclusion from educational opportunities available to nationals; limited access to healthcare, social security and other benefits available to nationals, leading to risk-taking behaviour and a sense of instability and marginalisation; curtailed employment opportunities; and psycho-social effects including anger, resentment, frustration and depression.44 Even in countries where reforms have removed discriminatory provisions from laws, gaps in the effective implementation of gender neutral laws can allow problems to persist.45 Target 5.1 offers the possibility of ensuring both reform and enforcement of laws that give women and men equal nationality rights. SDG 10, Target 10.3 (Ensure equal opportunity and reduce inequalities of outcome, including by eliminating discriminatory laws, policies and practices and promoting appropriate legislation, policies and action in this regard), together with SDG 16, Target 16.b (Promote and enforce non-discriminatory laws and policies for sustainable development) could also reinforce efforts to eliminate gender discriminatory nationality laws. Given that Targets 10.3 and 16.b are not restricted to discrimination on grounds of gender, they may also prove helpful in addressing laws and policies that discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, race, language or religion, which lie at the root of some of the largest and most protracted situations of statelessness. Instances of arbitrary deprivation of nationality continue in a range of countries and, in recent decades, have included situations of deprivation of nationality on the grounds of ethnicity or race, such as in the Dominican Republic,46 44 45 46 UNHCR and Collective for Research and Training on Development – Action, A Regional Dialogue on Gender Equality, Nationality and Statelessness: Overview and Key Findings, 2012; Equal Rights Trust, My Children’s Future: Ending Gender Discrimination in Nationality Laws, 2015; and Women’s Refugee Commission, Our Motherland, Our Country: Gender Discrimination and Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa, 2013. UNHCR and the Kenya Human Rights Commission, Kenya Dialogue on Gender Equality, Nationality and Statelessness, 2015. A 2013 Constitutional Court decision arbitrarily deprived tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent of their Dominican nationality, leading to the largest statelessness crisis in the Americas. After international outcry, a law was passed to provide a path to “naturalisation” of the newly stateless Dominican-born individuals and regularisation of some migrants. While the Constitutional Court decision and subsequent law were racially neutral 56