Rolling out our new identification toolkit

News

Identifying statelessness as early as possible in the asylum process is crucial, to ensure that stateless refugees can access their rights and don’t fall through the cracks. 

This is why we have developed an identification toolkit to help frontline practitioners to identify and address statelessness in countries across Europe and beyond. 

What is our identification toolkit?

With support from Comic Relief, together with our members, we have designed a guide to developing a country-specific toolkit to support frontline asylum practitioners, NGOs, lawyers, advice providers and volunteers working with refugees to identify when somebody might be stateless, and to respond accordingly. 

Our staff and members explain why the toolkit is a vital resource for identifying and addressing statelessness.

The guide provides key definitions and general information about the causes of statelessness and how to identify it, information about determining and preventing statelessness, and resources and support for stateless people that can then be adapted to each country. 

Following our #StatelessJourneys campaign and a successful pilot project in France, we have worked with partners on the ground to develop tailored toolkits for BulgariaCzechia, Germany, Romania and Turkey.

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Toolkit to identify and address statelessness

Our new project to roll out the toolkit in Europe and beyond

With funding from the US State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) we’re excited to be embarking on a new two-year project, which will enable us to further strengthen the capacity of frontline asylum practitioners to identify and address statelessness. 

Thanks to this funding, we will roll out our innovative toolkits to more countries, including: Georgia, Italy, Moldova, Armenia and Ukraine.

Our toolkits will equip government officials, NGOs, lawyers, and community representatives with practical tools to identify statelessness and facilitate legal pathways to protection for stateless people.  

Our longer-term ambition is to attract the resourcing necessary to roll out more toolkits to cover as many European countries as possible. Following our concerted advocacy efforts, the new EU Migration & Asylum Pact contains important provisions requiring EU Member States to identify and record where an individual seeking asylum may be stateless, but there are limited tools to support this to happen in practice. We hope that our toolkits can help monitor, inform, and influence the implementation of these new provisions in coming years.

Our PRM-funded project will enable the toolkit to have impact beyond Europe. We will be working with our sister network, the Central Asian Network on Statelessness (CANS), to adapt the toolkit for the Central Asian context, and pilot it in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan with frontline practitioners working with stateless communities in the region. We will also hold a major international conference in Istanbul later next year to share learning on the identification of statelessness and engage a diverse range of stakeholders from across the globe. 

Working collaboratively and in partnership, this project will align well with the Global Alliance to End Statelessness, which we will use as a platform to exchange and apply learning. We have consulted with affected communities, allies, sister networks, and decision-makers in the development of the project and are committed to working in partnership with all of our members and partners to ensure its success.

Our vision is for a global network of practitioners who are skilled in identifying statelessness and able to refer people to appropriate legal pathways to protection, thus ensuring that more and more people worldwide are able to access protection, and ultimately, to realise their right to a nationality. 

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