This article analyses the protection of stateless persons under the most recent case law of the European Court of Human Rights (i.e. Hoti v. Croatia and Sudita Keita v. Hungary). The article briefly discusses the phenomenon of statelessness and the basic mechanisms governing it, as well as the general standard for the application of Art. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights in cases involving foreigners who are stateless. This is followed by a discussion of the aforementioned ECtHR judgments, highlighting their principal findings. Thereafter the impact of UN standards concerning stateless persons on the ECtHR’s reasoning is assessed (based on the UNHCR’s third-party intervention in Hoti), as well as the differences between the approaches taken by the Strasbourg Court and the UN Refugee Agency. Finally, the treatment of foreigners in the Polish legal system is examined, and the importance of the Hoti and Sudita Keita judgments to the potential improvement of the situation of stateless persons in Poland is assessed.

The author outlines a basic framework for anarcho-capitalism, a stateless social order in which safety, law and adjudication of disputes are provided by private companies (private defense agencies) competing with each other in the free market. In the course of presentation, three fundamental problems of anarcho-capitalism are addressed. (1) Is a peaceful cooperation among agencies possible? (2) Would agencies respect the rights of their customers? (3) How would the law look like in an anarcho-capitalist society? The last problem is especially vexing, since anarcho-capitalists seem to be caught up in a contradiction here. On one hand they are proponents of a specific moral theory (based on non-aggression principle), on the other hand they do not allow for any central, monopolistic agency to impose that moral theory on society. Is it possible for the law in the anarcho-capitalist society to be simultaneously produced by competing agents and remain libertarian at the same time?

The wave of revolutionary uprisings in a series of Arab countries in 2010/11 also encouraged a number of minorities in the MENA region to take to the streets and raise their voices against discrimination and marginalization. Parts of Kuwait’s stateless Bidun were among the subalterns who now began to call for their civil rights as long-term residents of the country. The protests began in 2011, were upheld sporadically until 2014, and resurfaced in mid-2019 following the suicide of a young Bidun. After a brief look at the historical background and context, this contribution will focus on the mobilization and activities of pro-Bidun organizations in recent years (2011–2014/15, 2018–19/20) and ask whether there are signs of a broader alliance between Bidun and Kuwaiti citizens to counter the increasingly authoritarian, anti-democratic governmental policies. It will be argued that as from 2018/19, a rapprochement of positions can be discerned. However, the year 2020 brought a new setback.

States and individuals are the essential building blocks of international law. Normally, their identity seems to be solidly established. However, modern international law is widely permeated by the notion of freedom from natural or societal constraints. This notion, embodied for individuals in the concept of human rights, has enabled human beings to overcome most of the traditional ties of dependency and being subjected to dominant social powers. Beyond that, even the natural specificity of a human as determined by birth and gender is being widely challenged. The law has made far-going concessions to this pressure. The right to leave one’s own country, including renouncing one’s original nationality, epitomizes the struggle for individual freedom. On the other hand, States generally do not act as oppressive powers but provide comprehensive protection to their nationals. Stateless persons live in a status of precarious insecurity. All efforts should be supported which are aimed at doing away with statelessness or non-recognition as a human person through the refusal to issue identity documents.

Disputes about the collective identity of States also contain two different aspects. On the one hand, disin tegrative tendencies manifest themselves through demands for separate statehood by min ority groups. Such secession movements, as currently reflected above all in the Spanish provin ce of Catalonia, have no basis in in ternational law except for situations where a group suffers grave structural discrimin ation (remedial secession). As the common homeland of its citizens, every State also has the right to take care of its sociological identity. Many controversies focus on the distin ction between citizens and aliens. This distin ction is well rooted in domestic and in ternational law. Changes in that regard cannot be made lightly. At the universal level, international law has not given birth to a right to be granted asylum. At the regional level, the European Union has put in to force an extremely generous system that provides a right of asylum not only to persons persecuted in dividually, but also affords “subsidiary protection” to persons in danger of bein g harmed by military hostilities. It is open to doubt whether the EU in stitutions have the competence to assign quotas of refugees to in dividual Member States. The relevant judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 6 September 2017 was hasty and avoided the core issue: the compatibility of such decisions with the guarantee of national identity established under Article 4(2) of the EU Treaty.