A/HRC/38/52 recommended that the country adopt various measures to facilitate naturalization, including granting automatic citizenship at birth to children of non-citizen parents.87 53. The Special Rapporteur highlights that long-standing barriers in access to citizenship and naturalization in various countries have contributed to the deep-rooted forms of discrimination and exclusion faced by Sinti and Roma. Many members of the Roma and Sinti communities are stateless or face the risk of statelessness due to their lack of access to civil registration and identity documents. 88 Some of the major factors contributing to the lack of personal documents include complicated and burdensome bureaucratic procedures, lack of financial means to pay for the process of obtaining documentation, residence in unregistered settlements and difficulties in registering permanent place of residence, displacement, lack of access to free legal aid, lack of information about the procedures and discrimination. 89 These barriers mean that statelessness is passed on from generation to generation, further perpetuating the exclusion, discrimination and marginalization that Roma and Sinti communities experience in many countries. 54. At the same time, racial discrimination in the context of citizenship and immigration law and practice is often fuelled by national concerns and resulting policies that exist outside the realm of ethno-nationalism. An important example is national anxieties about national security and economic prosperity, which continue to facilitate racial discrimination on the basis of citizenship and immigration status. In the remainder of this section, the Special Rapporteur analyses these anxieties as contributing to racial discrimination and xenophobia, and condemns the role they play in perpetuating discrimination and intolerance on the basis of race, colour, descent, ethnicity, national origin or religion. B. National security machinery and anxiety 55. Especially in Western liberal democracies, anxieties about national security and terrorism threats have produced a far-reaching web of surveillance and other practices that result in racial discrimination on the basis of citizenship or immigration status. This trend continues the disturbing and unlawful practices extensively documented by the former Special Rapporteur in his 2017 thematic reports. In these reports, he provides a comprehensive analysis of the human rights violations and xenophobic rhetoric abetted by Governments and other actors in Europe, Asia, South America, the Middle East, North America and Africa, fuelled by exaggerated and manipulated terrorism and national security anxieties, especially targeting Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim.90 56. In some countries, politicians have spread misinformation that portrays certain racial, national and religious groups as inherent national security threats. These misinformation campaigns have been most vehemently propagated by political parties and leaders with ethno-nationalist commitments. These parties and leaders deliberately stoke and exploit the national security anxieties of national populations, and they effectively stigmatize entire racial, ethnic, national and religious groups in ways that make these groups even more vulnerable to racist and xenophobic violence. 91 57. States all over the world continue to use national security and counter-terrorism justifications to strip members of their national populations of citizenship. Rarely do States explicitly discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity or national origin in their citizenshipstripping processes. However, overbroad policies ostensibly rooted in national security concerns permit arbitrary enforcement — including arbitrary citizenship stripping — which in practice have a disproportionate effect on marginalized racial, national and religious 87 88 89 90 91 See A/HRC/7/19/Add.3, para. 88. See A/HRC/29/24, para. 36. OSCE, Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, “Summary report: expert seminar on access to identification and civil registration documents by Roma in Ukraine” (Kyiv, 2015), p. 6. Available at www.osce.org/odihr/211996?download=true. See A/HRC/35/41, paras. 48–75; A/72/287, paras. 11–45. See OHCHR, “Zeid warns against populists and demagogues in Europe and U.S.”, 5 September 2016. Available at www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20452. 17