Today we are marking the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, the most important international act aimed at preventing statelessness.

It is estimated that worldwide there are about 12 million stateless persons – those who are not considered to be nationals by any state under the operation of its law and who are denied access to all other rights on a daily basis as a consequence of being deprived of citizenship.

Statelessness may be the result of the conflicts of laws, discriminatory regulations depriving the marginalised communities of the possibility to acquire citizenship, succession of states after which a number of citizens do not succeed in acquiring citizenship of the newly established states, administrative practices related to the acquisition, recovery and loss of citizenship, as well as other numerous reasons.

In a world divided into states and citizens, those who fail to fit in that division are subject to various forms of exclusion. As a result, people without any citizenship have always encountered expulsions and restrictions on their fundamental human rights and freedoms. The Convention, whose fifty years of existence is celebrated today, resulted from the efforts of the international community to provide protection to those who cannot get protection from any state and to prevent the emergence of more people that no country would consider to be their nationals. Half a century later, the lives of stateless persons still attract the attention of the international community; there are newly emerging obstacles to the realisation of the right to citizenship and new causes of statelessness, but also the expectations that a solution will be finally found for those that cannot call any country their own.

Marking the anniversary of the Convention is an opportunity to once again point to the difficulties of those who face a risk of statelessness in Serbia and the necessity of solving their problems that have been neglected for too long.

There are those among them who have not been registered in birth registry books and for that reason remained without citizenship. Some of them were registered in the citizenship registry books that were destroyed, while others were left without citizenship upon the dissolution of the former state or acquired citizenship of one of the former republics in which they do not live.

You can read more about the obstacles to exercise the right to citizenship in the Republic of Serbia, the groups whose right to citizenship continues to be violated and the recommendations for overcoming the identified problems in the Praxis’ report entitled "Persons at Risk of Statelessness in Serbia."

Download the report: Persons at Risk of Statelessness in Serbia