Name: Angela
Date of birth: 28 January 2014
Country of birth: The Netherlands
Nationality: unknown

Angela lives with her brother Denny and their mother at the family location for rejected asylum seekers in Katwijk. Theoretically, they have to go back to their country of origin. According to the family’s lawyer, Denny and Angela epitomize the suffocating legislation surrounding nationality. ‘After you’ve lived here legally for three years, and provided you’ve been registered as stateless from birth, then you can become a Dutch citizen.’ But many newborns enter the municipal registers as ‘nationality unknown’ and end up in a life-long legal tug-of-war. This is in violation of the international agreements on statelessness that the Netherlands has signed. Angela and Denny are not allowed to stay in the Netherlands, but there’s also no other country for them to go to.