The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has called on the Maltese government to sign up to international legislation and implement a system that recognises individuals who are stateless.

Malta is not yet a signatory of the 1954 UN Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. The conventions aim to prevent people being rendered stateless in the first place but also provide a legal framework guiding countries that host people without citizenship on how to protect them.

Malta, along with Estonia, Poland and Cyprus within the EU, is not party to either convention despite a 2012 pledge by member states to all be signed up. 

A UNHCR report entitled  ‘Mapping Statelessness in Malta' also calls on the government to consider establishing a process with which to identify stateless people who arrive in Malta and raise awareness among the government institutions dealing with migrants.

The agency does not identify how many stateless people there are in Malta but they are not believed to number more than a few dozen at the most.

However, the UNHCR representative to Malta, Jon Hoisaeter, stressed that every affected individual faces fundamental problems.

“Stateless people do not have access to many of the basic rights that most of us take for granted - having no nationality often means having no future. But is a problem that we can solve,” he argued.