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Statelessness is a phenomenon that affects every region and almost every country of the world. However, not very many states have mechanisms in place to identify and prevent it, and protect stateless persons. This article ascertains international norms and best practices regarding the establishment and operation of a Statelessness Determination Procedure (‘SDP’), and to apply these to a future SDP in Nigeria. The requirements for an SDP are drawn from conventions, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees instruments and state practice. In proposing an SDP for Nigeria, in this contribution we strive for the most extensive protection for stateless persons, while taking the particular legal and institutional framework of Nigeria into account. We conclude that Nigeria, and in fact any state, may want to devote particular attention to standards relating to the legality and ‘bindingness’ of the proposed SDP, to procedural access and to procedural guarantees.

The UU team, Dr. Hanneke van Eijken and Professor Sybe de Vries, in coordination with the CEU research group (Dr. Marie-Pierre Granger and Dr. Orsolya Salát), has prepared a synthetic report,which provides a critical overview of the civil rights of EU citizens and third-country nationals in selected Member States (Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and Ireland). The analysis carried out for Deliverable 7.1 focuses on the recognition and scope of civil rights of EU citizens and third-country nationals by national, European and international law. The national reports reveal that the main sources of civil rights in the different countries are the national constitutions and specific national legislation, the European Convention of Human Rights and the EU Charter. In substantial terms, the civil rights are quite similar and entail, for instance, the freedom of expression and the right to a fair trial, freedom of association and assembly. The scope and recognition of civil rights in the countries assessed is nonetheless dependent on the national legal system and its openness to international and European civil rights. The application of the EU Charter is increasing in national case law. The ECHR seems, however, to be the main source of reference for international civil rights by national courts. Awareness of the civil rights in the EU Charter could thus be improved. A particular difficulty with the Charter is that it is only applicable within the scope of EU law, with the consequence national courts may be inclined to rely on the ECHR when in doubt as to whether the EU Charter is applicable to a specific national case. In terms of barriers to citizenship, it seems that, as a preliminary conclusion, the recognition of civil rights is much dependent on national legal systems and that judicial practice show a preference to refer to the ECHR over the EU Charter. There are, however, signs that this is slowly changing. In most countries, the national legislation lacks references to the EU Charter or the ECHR. Nevertheless, most of the international and European civil rights are recognized in national law, because these norms are directly applicable or because these norms are transposed into national law. &nbsp