Hungary is one of few countries to have acceded to all four of the core statelessness conventions. Although this has translated into some positive law, policy and practice at national level, there remain some significant gaps and the stateless population has never been comprehensively mapped. A statelessness determination procedure is established in law, and access, assessment, procedural protections and appeal rights under the procedure are generally positive. However, the definition of a stateless person in national law is narrower than the 1954 Convention, an application may be refused on national security grounds, applicants under the procedure lack protection from detention and removal, and the law provides only limited rights to people recognised as stateless. Access to nationality, although provided for in law, is very difficult to acquire in practice leaving most stateless people in the country unable to acquire a nationality even in the long term.
There are limited protections against the arbitrary detention of stateless people in Hungary and what limited procedural safeguards are in place have been deemed insufficient by various national and international actors. Safeguards exist in nationality law to prevent statelessness in the case of foundlings and children born abroad to Hungarian nationals. However, there are only partial safeguards to prevent children from being born stateless on the territory, adopted children may be stateless unless and until they acquire nationality through naturalisation, and, although births will be registered regardless of parents’ residence status, officials will register a child as having ‘unknown nationality’ unless this can be proven otherwise, causing significant problems for children later in life. There are no safeguards preventing statelessness in cases of deprivation of nationality.
Gábor Gyulai & and Katalin Juhász, Hungarian Helsinki Committee
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