- - - The need of ensuring the right to a nationality for all without discrimination and facilitating access to birth registration and other identity documentation to acquire a nationality. The importance of ratifying international human rights instruments, as well as the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness The need to reform and amend any repressive or discriminatory laws that may cause statelessness for minorities The need to remove any arbitrary procedural and administrative barriers in accessing identity documentation and nationality. Item V. Minority women and children affected by statelessness: advancing gender equality in nationality laws This session addressed the right to a nationality, which is a fundamental human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It highlighted that complex or onerous documentary and other requirements for proving one’s citizenship, barriers to birth registration, as well as laws, policies and practices that arbitrarily deny or deprive persons of their nationality can all contribute to the vulnerability of minorities, including those having nomadic lifestyle, to statelessness. The session discussed more effective and adapted ways to ensure access to documentation needed to prove nationality or entitlement to nationality for all without discrimination. This session highlighted the need for facilitation of birth registration, naturalization, confirmation or acquisition of citizenship. It also addressed the importance of taking effective measures to eliminate laws and practices that arbitrarily deny or deprive persons of their nationality on the basis of discriminatory grounds such as race, ethnicity, religion, or language. Ms. Nina Murray, European Network on Statelessness noted that if we are to fully understand how and why statelessness impacts on minorities around the world and find solutions, we have to understand multiple and intersecting disadvantages faced by people affected. She addressed statelessness affecting minority women in particular, since they face multiple disadvantages as a woman, a minority woman, a minority stateless woman. She also highlighted that the right to a nationality is enshrined in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, Convention on the Rights of the Child, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, linking it to the importance of addressing structural inequality and various forms of discrimination in addressing the issue of statelessness. She mentioned that statelessness is both a minority issue, a gender issue, a disability issue and a child’s right issue for people subjected to intersecting forms of discrimination. She highlighted the need to eliminate provisions in nationality laws that directly discriminate against women, which can be one of the main causes of statelessness. Nina Murray also stressed the necessity to look beyond explicit legal discrimination to understand the subtler forms of indirect discrimination in the way seemingly neutral laws are implemented in practice. She referred to the case of Roma women and children in Europe who are disproportionately affected by statelessness. She mentioned that though nationality laws do 11