Statelessness in international and European law

This investigation questions the capability of the international framework on statelessness in providing concrete protection to stateless persons. Though the international community has drafted several instruments that should support a protection status of stateless individuals and prevent the insurgence of statelessness, this phenomenon perdures. It has been often argued that the focal point behind this inability to produce an incisive effect on the matter is attributable to the lack of shared criteria and consistent implementation of Status Determination Procedures, without which, any right human right attributed to stateless individuals becomes inconsequential. After a review of the elements and their limitation, it emerged that regulating statelessness and providing solutions seems to represent a threat to the well-established sovereignty of states. Taking into account the inability of the international framework to produce binding legislation and related supervising mechanisms, this investigation identifies a regional approach as a first step towards closing these gaps, namely through the establishment of an EU directive on statelessness. It will be argued that the Union’s competence on the migration policy, combined with the equivalence of stateless individuals to TCNs within the Treaty of Lisbon, offers enough basis to compel the EU to require identification of statelessness within its border and to regulate their condition of entry and stay. Given the developing approximation of TCN’s status to that of citizens within the Union, to fully recognize statelessness through a right-based approach would provide the guarantees that the international framework has failed to secure.