Poland is one of the few EU countries that has not yet ratified the UN Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons of 1954 and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness of 1961. Without these regulations, stateless persons in Poland cannot count on quick resolutions to the problems they're facing.

'Invisible problem'

"The exact number of stateless persons in Poland is unknown, but various statistics indicate that there might be between 700 and 10,000 stateless people in our country, and children are a part of this number," says Dorota Pudzianowska, co-author of a new report on stateless children by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.

The inaccuracy of the data is a result of a fact that Poland has no procedure that could be used to determine if a given person is or is not stateless. "From that perspective, statelessness is an invisible problem," says Pudzianowska.

Stateless people face many problems, including the inability to obtain travel documents to leave Poland, says Pudzianowska. Furthermore, many stateless persons (including children) have difficulty obtaining a residence permit in Poland because they lack proper documents. Their undocumented status also leads to problems when they try to access medical and social care.

"In Poland, there are repeated cases of Roma children of Romanian and Bulgarian origin, who have been abandoned in the early '90s and who have not acquired any nationality,” says Marta Szczepanik, a co-author of the report. “In our report, we describe the cases of two children (Agni and Marysia) affected by this problem."

Loopholes

There are legal loopholes that result in the lack of comprehensive protection of children against statelessness at birth. Under Polish regulations, in certain cases a child acquires Polish citizenship by the mere fact of being born on Poland’s territory. This happens when the parents are unknown, have no citizenship or their citizenship in undefined.

In addition, a child of unknown parents acquires Polish citizenship if it was found on Polish territory. “However, if a child of citizens of other countries does not acquire citizenship after them because of conflicting regulations relating to nationality, as it is in case of, for example, citizens of Cuba, Sri Lanka or Syria, the child does not acquire Polish citizenship automatically by birth. This loophole should be closed,” says Pudzianowska.

Documents and definitions

In addition, Polish law does not contain a definition of “stateless person.” In practice, there are also problems with the interpretation of such terms as "unknown parents," which occurs, for example, when a mother is a foreigner and is considered as "known," even though she abandoned her child in the hospital, leaving behind only a trace of personal data, that's impossible to verify.

There is also a problem with the application of the provisions regarding birth registration, which do not strictly define what documents should be provided by parents in order to register the birth of a child. “It happened in practice that the lack of documents such as birth certificates of the parents was the reason for refusal of registration of birth of the child,” adds Szczepanik.

The HFHR’s report has been prepared as part of the campaign “None of Europe’s children should be stateless,” launched in November 2014 by the European Network on Statelessness. The report is based on data obtained from, among others, 16 voivodeship offices, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Chancellery of the President.

The full report is available here.