We have been able to achieve some 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 founder’s own experience of exclusion. After returning to Europe in 2016, Aleksejs Ivashuk repeatedly encountered employers and international organisations that did not understand his Latvian “non-citizen” 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. There is no legal basis for excluding stateless people from UN employment.
Early efforts to raise the issue with international organisations confirmed that it was considered “complicated”, 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 UNHCR’s 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 convened 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. The forum is now entering its fourth edition, to be hosted in Prague, Czech Republic.
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 Authority’s (EBA) consultations earlier that year influenced notable revisions to the draft regulatory technical standards (RTS) on customer due diligence under the EU’s 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 effective implementation and compliance by banks and financial institutions, these reforms can substantially improve financial inclusion and access to banking for forcibly displaced, stateless, and other vulnerable people across Europe.
Apatride Network helped realise these changes after being invited by the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL) to join a small consortium of civil-society organisations participating in online consultations with the EBA. Following these discussions, Apatride Network joined other consortium members in submitting detailed written recommendations to the EBA, which were subsequently incorporated into the revised draft.
Importantly, Apatride Network’s 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 project’s 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 institutions’ 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 EU’s 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 EU’s 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 “non-citizen” 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 applicant—who is also one of our members—with a reliable NGO partner in Czechia, the Organisation for Aid to Refugees (OPU). Our team helped OPU’s lawyers understand the specific form of statelessness at issue, provided relevant Latvian legislation, historical records, international precedents from other jurisdictions, and identified legal gaps and arguments that strengthened the case to its successful outcome.
The applicant in the case, Tanya, first met Apatride Network’s 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 to receive legal assistance support from the organisation.
Tanya moved to Czechia in 2013 and approached the immigration authorities to explain her Latvian “non-citizen” 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 “non-citizen” 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 Tanya’s Latvian “non-citizen” 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 Convention’s 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 “non-citizens” 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 Court’s 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 UNHCR’s 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 UNHCR’s 2021 country overview suggesting that Latvian “non-citizens” may fall within that exclusion. The Supreme Administrative Court found this conclusion insufficiently reasoned and inconsistent with UNHCR’s own guidance, according to which receiving rights beyond the Convention’s minimum protections is not enough: a person’s 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 Tanya’s status.
In the summer of 2023, Apatride Network faced a strategic choice: proceed with its plans to register as a non-profit organisation in Brussels, which it was in the midst of completing, or take the unconventional path of piloting the Global Statelessness Fund (GSF), through a novel fiscal-hosting arrangement with Open Collective Europe (OCE). The latter opportunity was introduced by Apatride Network’s close partner, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion. Apatride Network chose the unconventional path, becoming one of two stateless-led organisations to pilot the GSF and contribute to the evolution and refinement of the OCE platform. We are happy to see that the pilot’s success paved the way for the GSF to provide funding to more than 50 stateless-led organisations and campaigners globally. Support of this kind is essential to strengthening stateless-led work and addressing its persistent and severe underfunding.
Apatride Network chose fiscal hosting over conventional registration for three principal reasons: 1. piloting the GSF as an unregistered organisation using a fiscal host would provide other stateless-led organisations with a realistic framework for understanding what such an arrangement involves 2. fiscal hosting offered the flexibility needed to maintain our impact-first approach, allowing our time and capacity to be directed towards projects rather than administration, bureaucratic paperwork, and accounting 3. conventional registration presented a staffing and fundraising catch-22: establishing and maintaining a separate legal entity would require additional resources, which had no guarantees of being raised, while securing those resources would itself divert attention from our primary work.
During the first year of the GSF pilot, Apatride Network used almost its entire grant to establish and cover the costs of the above-mentioned Statelessness Awareness Forum (Europe). All of the organisation’s other projects continued to rely on the pro bono support and personal sacrifices of its members, as well as support from its partners. This illustrates the severe shortage of resources in efforts to address statelessness, particularly among stateless-led organisations, which possess direct knowledge of the subject, accurate understanding of potential solutions, and are best placed to make a difference in meaningful impact.
Since October 2023, Apatride Network has continued to receive support from the GSF and to use OCE and its platform to administer that support. Throughout this period, the organisation has devoted time and capacity to identifying and resolving technical glitches, administrative challenges, and invoicing questions across different European jurisdictions, for the purpose of fulfilling fiscal host’s requirements. Apatride Network’s regional scope complicated some aspects of the transactions, particularly in invoicing and reimbursements, but it also created valuable opportunities for learning and development, for all parties involved. Addressing these challenges has helped contribute to a more robust, adaptable, and sustainable fiscal-hosting model that can benefit organisations beyond Apatride Network itself.
Awareness-raising has been a central component of Apatride Network’s work from the very inception of the organisation. This focus stems from the recognition that awareness of statelessness remains extremely limited worldwide and that this gap constitutes a major initial barrier to effective initiatives and solutions. Even actors who should be familiar with the issue—including UN and government officials, academics, NGOs, and human rights organisations—often have little or no meaningful understanding of it. Worse still, misconceptions are widespread, shaped by deep power imbalances in the areas of narratives, data, and language: between the powerful states that create and maintain mass statelessness and the people directly affected by it. Statelessness cannot be effectively addressed or resolved without first correcting the knowledge gaps and inaccuracies surrounding it, by involving and centering the experiences of individuals and comunities affected.
Apatride Network has delivered an average of 20–30 guest lectures, workshops, and presentations on statelessness each year, primarily in person at universities across Europe, as well as occasionally elsewhere in the world. At the request of host institutions, these sessions have most often provided an introduction to statelessness. The continued demand for introductory teaching reflects how rarely the subject is addressed systematically in university curricula and professional training, even in fields closely connected to human rights, migration, international law, and public policy.
Other frequently requested themes have included the legal history of statelessness, the role and potential of technology in addressing its consequences, and more specialised presentations on Apatride Network’s work. These have covered financial inclusion, the prevention of childhood statelessness, access to legal assistance, and the importance of expertise grounded in direct experience. Through these activities, Apatride Network has helped introduce statelessness to new audiences, correct common misconceptions, and connect academic and professional discussion with the realities faced by stateless people.
These efforts are essential to move statelessness beyond the narrow institutional and academic pigeonhole in which it is too often confined. Broader awareness can help establish statelessness as a cross-cutting issue relevant to law, human rights, migration, development, technology, and public policy. Of central importance is the leadership and involvement of people who directly experience statelessness, whose knowledge can challenge misconceptions and help correct the imbalance between state-centred narratives and the realities of those affected. Over the long term, widening participation and improving public understanding can create a healthier environment for state accountability, making it more difficult for states to obscure or normalise statelessness as an unavoidable condition rather than confront it as a fundamental failure of the nation-state system.
To arrange a guest lecture, contact us at contact@apatride.eu