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.
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 Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Romania and Türkiye.
Our ambition to roll out the toolkit in Europe and beyond
Our toolkits are able to equip government officials, NGOs, lawyers, and community representatives with the practical tools necessary to identify statelessness and facilitate legal pathways to protection for stateless people.
Our 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. That is one reason why we want to roll out more toolkits to help monitor, inform, and influence the implementation of these new provisions over the coming years.
Working collaboratively and in partnership, our toolkit initiative aligns well with the Global Alliance to End Statelessness, which offers useful platform through which to exchange and apply learning. We have consulted with affected communities, allies, sister networks, and decision-makers in the development of our toolkits 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.
