22.

Recommends that the Member States make it a priority to support the positive developments in addressing statelessness in South and Southeast Asia, and proposes a new comprehensive policy approach including: — encouraging states to accede to the Statelessness Conventions by highlighting their benefits in the bilateral contacts between parliaments and ministries and at other levels; — supporting ASEAN Sectoral Bodies and SAARC in supporting their respective Member States to further realise the right to a nationality and ending statelessness; — highlighting the value of the Statelessness Conventions in multilateral fora; — working with states to advocate the benefits of gathering intersectional, disaggregated and verifiable national data on stateless persons and those with undetermined nationality, as identifying stateless persons is the first step for the states concerned to take the necessary measures to end statelessness; the data collected will then be used for registration, documentation, the delivery of public services, the maintenance of law and order and development planning; — consistently emphasising that birth registration needs to be free, easily accessible and undertaken on a non-discriminatory basis; — consistently emphasising that national identity management regimes need to include and provide identity documentation to all persons on the territory, including hard-to-reach and marginalised groups who may be at risk of statelessness or lack a nationality; — supporting South and Southeast Asia countries to ensure access to education to everyone, including stateless children, as statelessness is a significant obstacle that prevents children from being able to access equal education opportunities; — encouraging the important role of innovative technology by using digital birth registration programs in order to improve registration and archiving records; — addressing the issue of the content and application of nationality laws and the arbitrary deprivation or denial of the right to a nationality on the grounds of ethnicity, which is the major cause of statelessness in the region; — encouraging states in the region to address the needs of women, and issues related to sexual and gender-based violence, through human rights and community-based approaches, particularly for victims of trafficking; — addressing the issue of nationality laws and gender discrimination, as some countries make it difficult, or even impossible, for mothers to pass on their citizenship to their children; — ensuring that all development projects and humanitarian aid for which the EU provides funding are set up so that addressing statelessness is included whenever relevant; — building the capacity of relevant EU institutions and actors in order to understand, assess and programme and report on issues of statelessness, establishing regular reporting on the EU’s achievements in the fight against statelessness, including by incorporating a section on statelessness into the EU’s Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy in the world; — ensuring that statelessness, nationality and citizenship are appropriately covered in human rights and democracy country strategies, and that the latter are based on the principle that everyone, regardless of gender, race, colour, skin, faith or religion, national origin or belonging to a national or ethnic minority, is entitled to nationality; addressing the issue of statelessness during every political and human rights dialogue with the countries concerned; — setting-up EU human rights guidelines on statelessness in order to provide concrete measurable objectives for the EU’s efforts to eliminate statelessness worldwide; — increasing dialogue on statelessness in South and South East Asia with relevant regional and international organisations as well as with neighbours of the South and South East Asian countries and other active states in the region; — ensuring that participants in election observation missions are aware of statelessness issues where relevant; — highlighting the necessity of empowering regional human rights bodies so that they can play a more active role in identifying and eliminating statelessness; — reserving adequate funding in the Development Cooperation Instrument, European Development Fund and European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights budgets for NGOs and other organisations working to reach stateless communities; promoting partnerships between civil society organisations and statelessness communities in order to empower them so they can fight for their rights; — encouraging coordination among countries for tackling statelessness, especially where it has cross-border effects, and including the exchange of best practices in implementing international standards on the fight against statelessness; — ensuring follow-up, such as awareness-raising and technical support for public administrations as a means of capacity-building, including at local level when there have been positive developments that need to be implemented in practice, such as in Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Bangladesh, where the citizenship of the Biharis, including their voting rights, was restored;