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Records of unreported legal cases
State level information and investigations
Reports of IGOs and NGOs, including refugee community organisations and
independent official bodies set up by States such as Ombudspersons
Academic studies
Press reports and social media
These cover both the situation of children in Council of Europe countries and information
about children in countries from which refugees come to Europe.
ENS and its members have been involved in much of the work undertaken on the situation
in Council of Europe countries, whether as producer or contributor. The Institute on
Statelessness and Inclusion, an ENS member, is also a major contributor and is plugged into
work being done in other regions of the world.
Information within those written reports, and conversations with lawyers, academics, and
representatives of NGOs, all indicate that there is a much greater volume of knowledge
nowhere recorded or written down. Knowledge arises where a person identifies that a child
is potentially stateless. This may be because the person is a lawyer or country expert already
aware of the risk of statelessness in the country of origin in question. Or it arises because
the person has attempted to assist the child with a civil procedure that requires proof of
nationality and has uncovered that such proof does not exist.
When the information comes to light it is often not pursued. For example, in one case
examined, an expert lawyer understood that he might have a case to attempt to register a
child as stateless; but the child’s mother (an asylum-seeker) was unable to meet the
evidential burden of proof. The child was theoretically eligible for registration as a stateless
person but would shortly become eligible for nationality of the host country based on birth
on, and length of residence in, the territory. It was a question of whether to do things the
hard way, or the easy way. The statelessness claim would involve costly investigation, but
the claim based on length of residence a higher fee. The child’s statelessness could be
removed without having to be proven.
It is difficult to collect and access unrecorded evidence. One way to decide where best to
direct efforts is to consider the cases in which this would be a step to resolving the child’s
statelessness, whether by facilitating an application for nationality or making the case for a
route to such an application where none exists.
3.1 Accounts of, and documentation held by, individual refugees, people seeking asylum,
people refused asylum, and other migrants
The accounts of parents of stateless children, and the documents they hold, are important
in understanding how statelessness is produced and key to understanding how it is
negotiated. They are largely absent from much of the literature.
Refugees and migrants (including people who have been refused international protection)
are often the object of studies, caught in a ‘case study’ box. Where their voices are
reflected in UN, NGO, and academic literature, what is found for the most part are ‘stories’,
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