Some issues are less visible but more persistent: lack of registration, administrative barriers, poverty and discrimination
Originally published on Global Voices
A passport of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After Yugoslavia’s dissolution, citizenship laws in successor states left some people facing years of legal uncertainty. Photo by Global Voices, CC-BY.
Issues related to statelessness affecting the countries that formerly comprised the Federative Yugoslavia can map trends that affect wider Europe. These range from generational complications of citizenship status due to shifting borders, to systemic discrimination causing Roma exclusion from official paperwork of their native countries.
Such issues are documented through the Statelessness Index, developed by the European Network on Statelessness. It assesses European countries’ laws, policies, and practices on protecting stateless people and preventing or reducing statelessness, measured against international standards and good practice.
Between 1990 and 2008, Yugoslavia (comprised of entities which already had formal statehood – six republics and two autonomous provinces) dissolved into seven independent countries. These countries faced similar challenges, but also experienced important differences that affect their institutional responses to statelessness.
Slovenia and Croatia are members of the European Union (EU), which provides them with additional means to deal with societal problems. The others are aspiring EU members, with varying degrees of success on their candidacy: Montengro is considered a frontrunner; Serbia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina lag behind in fulfiling criteria; and Kosovo’s chances are hindered by non-recognition from some EU members.
While Yugoslavia existed, its citizens enjoyed freedom of movement through the federation; many settled outside the republics of their birth, for either economic or family reasons. Similar to someone moving between states in the USA, there was no need to change citizenship. Post-independence, however, citizenship laws were rewritten, so people born in other republics who decided to remain in their place of residence — where they might have lived for decades — suddenly had to deal with paperwork issues. This also affected their children regardless of birthplace, as birthright citizenship was not always automatic.
In successor states, granting citizenship to residents born outside of current borders involved numerous complications, even when they fulfilled formal criteria. For instance, the fact that the 1994 Macedonian government, led by social democrats, provided naturalized citizenship for legal residents born in Kosovo and Serbia — mostly ethnic Albanians and Bosniaks — is used ahead of every election cycle by their right-wing populist opponents who repeat disinformation narratives of “importing 150,000 voters from Kosovo”. Another conspiracy theory claims citizenship was given to refugees from the 1999 Kosovo War, when in fact most of them returned to their country.
More than three decades later, the issues of statelessness in these seven countries with shared historical roots, have different contemporary forms. Most of them deal with the status of people who did not — or could not — regulate their citizenship after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Other issues are less visible but more persistent: lack of birth registration, missing personal documents, poverty, discrimination, and administrative barriers that disproportionately affect Roma, Ashkali, and Balkan Egyptian communities.
One of the most recent milestones came in July 2025, when The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) announced that North Macedonia had become the first in the region to resolve all known cases of statelessness caused by the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. According to UNHCR, the last 317 people who had lived in legal limbo since independence were granted citizenship. The result came after years of effort, which included cooperation between international and national institutions, as well as awareness raising, via the 2017 UNHCR campaign comparing statelessness to invisibility:
UNHCR later noted that almost 20,000 stateless people had acquired citizenship in North Macedonia since 2001, and that 2021 amendments to the Law on Citizenship had provided a legal solution for people who had remained without nationality since Yugoslavia’s breakup. Yet, statelessness had not been fully eradicated: 147 people, most of them children born in North Macedonia, still lacked citizenship because of missing birth registrations.
This is the current shape of statelessness in the Balkans. It is no longer only about people left behind by the disappearance of one state, but about those present in today’s states who remain difficult for institutions to “see.”
Take young Valentin Rakip from Skopje. Born in North Macedonia, he spent years without legal identity because his birth had not been registered and paternity had not been acknowledged. Without documents, he could not enrol in high school, access regular medical or dental care, work legally, or travel abroad. “I feel like a foreigner in this country,” he told UNHCR in 2022, after a 12-year legal struggle to obtain nationality:
Such cases show why civil registration is not just a technical issue: a child without a birth certificate cannot enter the legal order, and may later struggle to obtain an identity card, prove citizenship, access health insurance, continue education, register residence, find formal employment, open a bank account, or inherit property.
The Statelessness Index notes that in June 2023, North Macedonia took steps towards providing these rights, amending the laws to require immediate registration of every child born in its territory, regardless of the nationality or personal status of the parents. It also reports that implementation issues remain, and that barriers to birth registration disproportionately affect Romani communities.
The difference between a law on paper and in real life was at the centre of a collective lawsuit brought by the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC) and the Macedonian Young Lawyers Association (MYLA). In July 2025, the Basic Civil Court in Skopje issued a first-instance judgment concerning unregistered persons, particularly Roma, who had been placed in a “Special Birth Registry” and issued temporary documents. According to MYLA, these documents often failed to function in practice and were not recognised for access to the services for which they had been created.
In December 2025, the European Roma Rights Centre reported that the Court of Appeal had confirmed the ruling, making it final and legally binding. The appellate court upheld the finding that the violations were systemic and that the state had treated affected individuals differently without a legitimate or proportional objective. The judgment underlined that access to birth registration is not a discretionary administrative matter, but a core state obligation linked to fundamental rights. A statement by ERRC Legal Director Senada Sali captured the essence of the injustice, emphasising that “institutional inaction amounts to discrimination.”
The documentary film “The Invisible ones” (Невидливите) also addressed these developments. The same pattern appears, with national variations, across the region of former Yugoslavia.
The Statelessness Index says that Serbia is party to the 1954 and 1961 Conventions on Statelessness, but lacks a dedicated statelessness determination procedure. Birth registration bylaws require parents to present birth certificates and identity documents, increasing the risk that births remain unregistered. As in most other Balkan countries, some safeguards exist, but the people most in need of them may be least able to satisfy the documentation requirements needed to apply them.
Kosovo has safeguards in nationality law to prevent childhood statelessness, and birth registration is assured. However, the Statelessness Index reports that Romani, Ashkali, and Egyptian communities face practical barriers, including lack of documentation, difficult procedures, inconsistent implementation, stigma, and limited awareness. Late birth registration is possible, but lengthy and complex if evidence is missing.
Variations of these issues also affect Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2017, the country reduced the number of Roma persons without documents from some 3,000 to 57. Its laws contain some safeguards, including for foundlings, adopted children, and children born abroad to Bosnian citizens. But children with undocumented parents are often prevented from registering births within the regular period, especially when paperwork is missing. Again, Roma communities have been disproportionately affected.
Montenegro is notable because it introduced a statelessness determination procedure in 2018, but it is not implemented consistently: “As of October 2024, 11 people had been recognised as stateless and 19 applications were pending,” according to the Statelessness Index, while “UNHCR reported a total of 420 identified people at risk of statelessness in Montenegro as of November 2024, of which over 55 percent were children, although the real number is likely higher.”
The situation in Slovenia and Croatia shows that EU membership alone does not rectify the issue. Slovenia remains marked by the legacy of the “erased ones,” including 25,671 people who were removed from the register of permanent residents after independence, and who struggled for 20 years to regain their rights. While Slovenia acceded to the Statelessness Convention in 2025, it still lacks a dedicated statelessness determination procedure, and has gaps in safeguards for children born in Slovenia who would otherwise be stateless.
The 2018 Slovenian drama film “Izbrisana” (“Erased”) offered an artistic perspective on the Kafkaesque nightmare endured by people who are “not in the computer”:
Croatia, also party to both the 1954 and 1961 Conventions on Statelessness, has no dedicated procedure to determine statelessness and grant stateless people adequate protection. Its 2021 census counted 558 stateless people and 173 people with “unknown citizenship,” while UNHCR estimated 733 people under its statelessness mandate in Croatia as of mid-2023. The Statelessness Index adds that discriminatory practices create obstacles for some children, and the current National Plan for Roma Inclusion does not include measures on statelessness awareness, prevention, and reduction.
This comparison shows that when it comes to statelessness, the line does not run neatly between EU and non-EU members. EU accession can create pressure for legal reform, but legal identity depends on local political will in order to ensure that institutions actively remove barriers for people who lack documents, live in informal settlements, cannot prove residence, or belong to communities long treated with suspicion.
Data matters, as stateless people are often missing not only from citizenship registers, but also from official statistics. Categories such as “stateless,” “unknown citizenship,” “without nationality,” or “at risk of statelessness” are not always defined or used consistently in censuses.
If the breakup of Yugoslavia created one generation of legal uncertainty, today’s challenge is to prevent new generations from inheriting invisibility by resolving remaining citizenship cases and ensuring things like universal birth registration, functional identity documents, accessible residence registration, free or affordable procedures, legal aid, and outreach in communities that have reason not to trust institutions.