We have been able to achieve notable progress in addressing the gaps and barriers related to statelessness, focusing on the real-life challenges faced by stateless individuals and communities. The following page highlights some of our most significant accomplishments.
Apatride Network secured the removal of administrative barriers to the employment of stateless people at UNHCR. The advocacy grew from its founderâs own experience of exclusion. After returning to Europe in 2016, Aleksejs Ivashuk repeatedly encountered employers and international organisations that did not understand his Latvian ânon-citizenâ status. Even organisations mandated to promote equality and inclusion, like the UN and OSCE, lacked an appropriate option for stateless applicants in mandatory nationality fields, as well as corresponding HR and legal-team procedures, casting doubt about whether they could apply or be employed at all.
Early efforts to raise the issue with international organisations confirmed that it was considered âcomplicatedâ, but produced no clear solution. After founding Apatride Network in 2020, Aleksejs continued addressing the broader economic exclusion faced by stateless people, in the UN and beyond. Following his forced displacement from Ukraine to Switzerland in 2022, he raised the issue directly with UNHCR in Geneva. UNHCR requested evidence of the barrier and examples of more inclusive practices. Apatride Network’s team compiled this proof, explained the legal and practical importance of reform, and continued to persistently follow up so that the issue would not be forgotten.
Apatride Network amplified this advocacy after joining UNHCRâs Advisory Board of Organisations Led by Forcibly Displaced and Stateless Persons in December 2022. In August 2024, UNHCR finally confirmed to Apatride Network that the problem had been addressed, enabling stateless applicants to inclusively use the agency’s recruitment process.
This breakthrough shows why institutions need stronger and more direct engagement with ground-level and lived-experience expertise. Important good practice has been established, but further work is needed across the wider UN system to ensure that stateless people are not excluded from employment simply because their legal status is poorly understood. Apatride Network continues to lead this work, to help the UN fulfil its mandate while pushing for access to rights and more liveable life for all stateless people.
The idea of a stateless-led international forum emerged not long after the founding of Apatride Network. It was conceived as a response to a central question: how can awareness of statelessness be expanded beyond the narrow circles of specialists who work on the issue? The idea remained dormant for some time, until Apatride Network members met in Brussels, Belgium, in early spring of 2023, and decided to bring it to life. A full year of intensive planning, outreach, and organisation followed, culminating in the launch of the first edition of Statelessness Awareness Forum (Europe), or SAF(E), in March of 2024, in Alicante, Spain.Â
The launch of SAF(E) marked a historic shift: it established an international platform designed to expand awareness of statelessness, centre ground-level expertise, and sustain engagement year after year. The forum is stateless-led and responds to gaps in knowledge of the subject, including the fact that discussion of statelessness remains largely confined to small specialist circles, while the voices and ground-level reality expertise of stateless people are still overlooked. Through an immersive, multi-day programme, SAF(E) brings together people with lived-experience expertise, other leading experts, students, academics, NGOs, UN staff, and other stakeholders. It creates space for candid, reality-checked exchange and helps return greater control over statelessness narratives to the affected.
Each edition of the forum introduces new participants and institutions to statelessness, strengthens cross-country and interdisciplinary cooperation, and encourages participants to share what they have learned within their own communities and fields of work. SAF(E) also follows up on initiatives from previous editions, supports alumni-led activities, and guides implementation toward results.
Across its editions, SAF(E) has brought together participants from more than thirty universities, twenty institutions, thirty countries, and five continents, ranging from those new to statelessness to seasoned experts. By connecting such diverse stakeholders, it has fostered meaningful relationships that extend beyond the forum itself. Each edition expands the network of people equipped to understand, discuss, and take action on statelessness, carrying its lessons beyond the forum.
Towards the end of 2025, Apatride Network received remarkable news: its contributions to the European Banking Authorityâs (EBA) consultations earlier that year influenced notable revisions to the draft regulatory technical standards (RTS) on customer due diligence under the EUâs anti-money-laundering framework. Among the positive changes, the revised draft explicitly recognises statelessness, refugee status, and subsidiary-protection status; introduces greater flexibility in identity verification where conventional documents are unavailable for legitimate reasons; distinguishes legal identity from the possession of a passport; and allows required information to be established through alternative credible means. Subject to compliance, the reforms can substantially improve financial inclusion and banking access for forcibly displaced, stateless, and other vulnerable people in Europe.
Apatride Network contributed to these changes after being invited by the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law to join a small consortium of civil-society organisations participating in online consultations with the EBA. Following these discussions, along with other members of the consortium, Apatride Network also submitted detailed written input.Â
Importantly, Apatride Networkâs written recommendations were grounded in evidence gathered through its financial inclusion project, launched in October 2023 with the support of PILnet and its law firm partners. Recognising the widespread exclusion of forcibly displaced and stateless people from banking and other essential financial services, the project examined how rigid and unqualified identification requirements, customer due-diligence procedures, and limited understanding of non-standard legal statuses can prevent people from opening or maintaining bank accounts, even where they are legally entitled to access such services. Its findings enabled Apatride Network to present the EBA with practical and evidence-based input reflecting both the realities of vulnerable populations and the problematic barriers underlying their exclusion.
In the projectâs first stage, participating law firms researched and reported on the regulatory framework governing what banks and other financial institutions are permitted and required to do. In parallel, Apatride Network interviewed forcibly displaced and stateless people affected by financial exclusion across nineteen EU countries and the United Kingdom. Through interviews of the affected people, recurring problems and unjustified barriers were documented, many of which stemmed from financial institutionsâ limited understanding of legal identity documents, diversity of legal statuses, and international protection categories. The evidence formed an important basis for input with the EBA, contributing to important changes in European banking standards that more clearly recognise statelessness and displacement, allow flexibility in identity verification, and encourage financial institutions to avoid excluding customers simply because they cannot provide “conventional” identity documents.
The EBA has already published its final advice, after which responsibility for developing the standards was transferred to the EUâs new Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA). Once AMLA finalises the draft standards and the European Commission adopts them, they are expected to support implementation of the EUâs new anti-money-laundering framework, which is due to become applicable in July 2027. In the meantime and beyond, Apatride Network will continue its financial inclusion work to help ensure that banks and other financial institutions across Europe understand and comply with current and forthcoming requirements designed to protect access to banking for people at risk of financial exclusion.
In December 2024, the Czech Supreme Administrative Court upheld the recognition of a Latvian ânon-citizenâ as stateless under the 1954 Convention, finding that the rights attached to that status were not sufficiently comparable to those of Latvian citizens to trigger the exclusion clause in Article 1(2)(ii). The decision effectively opens a dignified pathway out of statelessness for Europe’s largest accounted stateless community. Apatride Network played a central role in the case by connecting the applicantâwho is also one of its membersâwith its NGO partner in Czechia, the Organisation for Aid to Refugees (OPU). Our team helped OPUâs lawyers understand the specific form of statelessness at issue, provided relevant Latvian legislation, historical records, and international precedents from other jurisdictions, and identified legal gaps and arguments that strengthened and led the case to its successful outcome.
The applicant in the case, Tanya, first met Apatride Networkâs founder by chance, before the stateless-led organisation had been established. Initially, Mr Ivashuk sought to connect her with IOM and UNHCR for advice and assistance, but these efforts did not result in any meaningful support. Soon after Apatride Network was founded, Tanya became one of the first people it referred to a partner NGO, OPU, for legal assistance.
Tanya moved to Czechia in 2013 and approached the immigration authorities to explain her Latvian ânon-citizenâ status openly. The authorities examined her circumstances, including the fact that she had been born in Latvia to a father who was also born there. In light of her genuine ties to Latvia, the Czech immigration authorities initially concluded that her ânon-citizenâ status should not place her at a disadvantage when seeking a residence permit, on the basis of her roots in an EU Member State. Less than a year later, however, another Czech authority reversed that position.
Given that Tanyaâs Latvian ânon-citizenâ status did not grant her the key rights associated with Latvian citizenship for her stay in Czechia, she sought recognition as stateless under the 1954 Convention. The Czech Ministry of the Interior rejected her application, arguing that her Latvian passport, permanent residence rights, and other protections brought her within the Conventionâs Article 1(2)(ii) exclusion clause. In July 2024, the Prague Municipal Court annulled that decision, finding that no state regarded Tanya as a legal national and that the substantial differences between the rights of Latvian citizens and ânon-citizensâ meant the exclusion clause did not apply. It also rejected the view that the status was merely temporary. The Ministry appealed, but in December 2024 the Czech Supreme Administrative Court dismissed the appeal and upheld the Municipal Courtâs reasoning.
Paradoxically, our other partner, UNHCR, played a contradictory and problamatic role in the case. Its position supported the argument against recognising Tanya as stateless. The courts relied on UNHCRâs interpretative guidance when assessing how narrowly the exclusion clause in Article 1(2)(ii) should be applied. The judges declined to follow an assertion in UNHCRâs 2021 country overview suggesting that Latvian ânon-citizensâ may fall within that exclusion. The Supreme Administrative Court found this conclusion insufficiently reasoned and inconsistent with UNHCRâs own guidance, according to which receiving rights beyond the Conventionâs minimum protections is not enough: a personâs status must closely approximate that of a citizen. The Court stressed that UNHCR guidance is influential but not legally binding, and that its authority depends on the persuasiveness of its reasoning. An unexplained institutional position could not therefore replace an independent and impartial legal assessment of Tanyaâs status.
Secured the removal of barriers to the vocational inclusion of stateless people at UNHCR.