Photo source: A sketch of people holding their documents. Taken by Suraajm, via Pixabay, on June 20th, 2025.
29-10-2025
Julia Crubellate
Europe Team Researcher,
Global Human Rights Defence.
Introduction
The 1954 United Nations (UN) Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons defines a stateless person as someone “who is not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law” (UNHCR, 1954), meaning that the person does not have a nationality, a legal bond between a State, and its population.
A stateless person is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its laws, meaning that the individual has no legal attachments to any country and, therefore, cannot benefit from its rights nor receive any institutional protection.
While some people are born stateless and remain so throughout their lives, others become stateless over the years. The causes are manifold, including complexities of conflicts in nationality laws, state succession, forced displacement, historical and contemporary migration, structural birth registration issues, religious and ethnic persecution, administrative problems, and so on (EUAA, 2021).
Although the right to a nationality and all that entails it is reflected in numerous ratified international treaties, and is considered a human right by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) in its Articles 6 and 15, statelessness still affects around 442,000 people around the world, with this number being highly underestimated, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (UNHCR, 2022).
Statelessness has a severe and lifelong impact particularly on those it directly affects. This exclusion denies humans from the basic rights that most people take for granted, such as having access to education, health care, marriage and job opportunities, access to justice and even dignity of having an official burial and a death certificate.
Europe still struggles to recognise and welcome people under this status, even if they have been living in the same country for generations. This phenomenon is still widespread, particularly in Nordic and Baltic countries, with more than 292,000 people being officially recognised as stateless, including the non-citizens in Latvia, a special category of people, considered as de facto stateless.
The danger of the invisible de facto statelessness
Statelessness is usually viewed exclusively through de jure perspective, meaning that the person does not have any official nationality at all, without equal consideration of de facto statelessness, which affects those who lack an effective nationality. These people might be formally considered as nationals by their countries, but do not enjoy the same rights as the latter.
One example are the non-citizens of Latvia, as they are considered nationals, but do not have political rights and are barred from certain professions such as those related to state service, law and enforcement, and independent professions within the judicial system.
Whereas an international treaty regime has been developed for addressing problems of de jure statelessness, including the 1954 and 1961 Conventions, there is no such legally binding international regime at the global level for de facto conditions. This leaves individuals in a limbo where they are not totally disregarded by their own countries and, therefore, can apply for international protection under the 1954 Convention, but are not granted equal rights as their fellow citizens because they do not have nationality, being considered as second-hand citizens.
This means that formally they have juridical ties to the country, but they cannot vote, cannot occupy job positions related to the government or to judicial powers. Consequently, this leads to discrimination, and can be an obstacle to acquiring full nationality, as can be observed in the case of non-citizens of Latvia.
The Republic of Latvia
The Republic of Latvia, centre of the three Baltic states, flanked by Estonia and Lithuania, sits across the sea from Sweden, and has been a member of the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since 2004. With a population of around 1.871 million people in 2024, Latvia declared its independence in 1991, after being annexed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1940 (Britannica, 2025).
Before its occupation, ethnic Latvians constituted about three-fourths of the country’s population. Today, they make up three-fifths and Russians account for one-fourth, surpassing the original ethnic groups. There are also other minorities, such as Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Lithuanians. It is a country politically organised as a republic with a president, a unicameral parliament, called the Saeima, and a prime minister. Latvia is also part of the 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions.
Although the stateless population has not been mapped, the Latvian authorities count and publish population data on statelessness, with a stateless category in national statistics. However, it only includes individuals that have been granted statelessness status under the statelessness determination procedure, while those considered “non-citizens” (nepilsoņi) are counted separately (Embassy of the Republic of Latvia to Georgia, 2023).
Under domestic law, “non-citizens” are excluded from the definition of a stateless person as they are considered a separate legal category of persons who enjoy a significant set of rights, beyond the minimum prescribed by the conventions. They are not considered stateless but do not enjoy full rights as citizens and lack a nationality.
Non-citizens in Latvia do not have political rights and have several restrictions on employment and land ownership. Previously, this status was also passed down from parents to their children who were born already as non-citizens. However, the adoption of a new law granted citizenship to foundlings, adopted children, children born from nationals, and those born from non-nationals in the country or abroad. This law, titled On Terminating the Granting of Non-Citizen Status to Children, in 2019, amended the 2013 Citizenship Law.
Around 180,000 people remain stateless with “non-citizen” status in the country, 42 percent identifying as members of the ethnic Belarusian minority and 24.5 percent of the ethnic Russian minority (Latvian Centre for Human Rights, 2024).
According to the Law on the Status of those Former USSR Citizens who do not have the Citizenship of Latvia or that of any Other State (2007) and the Cabinet Regulation No. 1011 “Procedures for Determination of the Status of Non-citizen of Latvia”, adopted on December 14th, 2004, a person shall be recognised as a non-citizen. To qualify, they must (i) have been registered in Latvia as of July 1st, 1992, (ii) must not be citizens of Latvia, and (iii) must not have been citizens of another state.
According to the relevant laws, a child born in Latvia before December 31st, 2019, is automatically considered a non-citizen if they are not, and have never been, a citizen of any other country. This applies when one parent is a non-citizen and the other is a citizen of another country, when both parents are non-citizens, or when one parent is stateless.
The Latvian Constitutional Court has stated that non-citizens cannot be considered as stateless persons, reasoning that with the adoption of the non-citizen law, a new category of persons emerged that was previously unknown in international law, meaning that they have a special legal status, different from citizens, foreigners, or stateless persons.
The UNHCR considers Latvian non-citizens as stateless people, treating them as persons without citizenship, therefore including their number in the overall UN statistics on stateless persons in its annual reports.
Although still preliminary, progress has been made to welcome these non-citizens and to simplify their access to nationality, while also eliminating child statelessness by adopting laws that grant automatic citizenship to children of non-citizens as of January 1st, 2020. This measure represents significant progress toward implementing the right of each child to a nationality at birth, and toward fully including all children in the society, as expressed by Dunja Mijatovic, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights (2019).
Other countries are also moving forward towards considering non-citizens as stateless people, such as the Czech Republic, where the Municipal Court of Prague ruled in 2022 that non-citizens are stateless people and, therefore, the Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons should apply, considering them as such and under international protection:
Reasoning: 1. Definition of the matter the plaintiff requested the recognition of the status of a stateless person. By the contested decision, the defendant ruled that the plaintiff is not such a person. The plaintiff is a so-called non-citizen (nepilsoņa) of Latvia (…) The court in this matter is faced with the question of whether non-citizens are stateless persons to whom the Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons (Notification No. 108/2004 Coll., hereinafter referred to as the “Convention”) applies. For the reasons described below, the court has concluded that they are. (File No. 11 A 52/2022‑57, 2024)
Conclusion
Access to citizenship is a fundamental right that confers formal legal rights such as the right to vote and to be elected, and so is every child’s right to acquire nationality at birth, as supported by Article 7 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Latvia is a signatory.
While not officially stateless under domestic law, the non-citizens of Latvia lack full citizenship and political rights, affecting their inclusion in society. Recent legal reforms, particularly granting automatic citizenship to children of non-citizens, mark progress in reducing child statelessness and improving access to nationality. However, the ambiguous status of non-citizens continues to raise questions under international law, with bodies like the UNHCR and some foreign courts recognising them as de facto stateless, highlighting ongoing challenges in ensuring full rights and protection.
It is necessary that the country keeps pushing forwards towards accepting all citizens as full citizens. They need to ensure that people are not subjected to differential treatment based on the origin of their family, and that each citizen has access to acquire the nationality in an accessible way, to be fully integrated in the community where they live.
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