Problems related to statelessness as a consequence of the war in Ukraine from the Polish perspective

Abstract

One of the problems that has become particularly important for Europe in the face of the ongoing war in Ukraine is the problem of statelessness. It concerns not only the imperfections of applicable legal regulations and their interpretation but above all the practice of their application. It is also visible in Poland, a country that, as one of Ukraine's closest neighbors, was strongly affected by the war, among other things, through the influx of people fleeing the war. This Polish perspective has become a point of interest for considerations on problems related to statelessness. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the connection between the ongoing war in Ukraine and the increased risk of statelessness in Poland. Moreover, an indication of the complexity of the topic, which concerns not only the universal problem of creating and avoiding statelessness but also the situation of individual people affected by statelessness. Stateless persons are deprived of the opportunity to enjoy the full catalog of human rights. The author comes to the belief that work related to Poland's ratification of two global instruments on statelessness (the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness) should be accelerated. It is also necessary to create an internal, comprehensive legal regulation relating to stateless persons, which would ensure their protection. The idea is to create mechanisms to facilitate their acquisition of citizenship as well as to create preventive mechanisms to prevent the problem of statelessness. The basic research methods used were the historical method to describe the beginnings of interest in the problem of statelessness, the dogmatic-legal method to describe the phenomenon of statelessness, and the analysis of applicable legal regulations and other source texts to describe the effects and consequences of statelessness.