It’s often the things you take for granted in life that are the most important. The passport you use when going on holidays, the birth certificate sitting in the back of your filing cabinet, the PPSN that you use to do your taxes. But, imagine your life if you didn’t have those documents – no going abroad, not being able to register for school, not being able to get a job. This is the reality of life for up to 10 million people globally, who do not have a nationality, who have none of those documents. These people are stateless, meaning that they do not have any official nationality. Often trapped in poverty, there is no way of improving their situation due to difficulty accessing healthcare, education, and employment. Overall, this can be a very difficult situation to solve. 

 

Statelessness can happen in a few ways. Some people become stateless due to purposeful discrimination by governments, while others may be affected by accident, when country boundaries change or when there are gaps in nationality laws. Other people may become stateless because they are refugees, which can make it difficult to prove where they or their parents were born due to a lack of documentation. Some children experience statelessness because of nationality laws which disallow their mothers from passing on citizenship, such as in Qatar. This means that if the child’s father is unknown or from a country with laws keeping him from passing on citizenship for some reason, the child will be unable to receive a nationality. Often entire groups of people end up stateless, just like how lots of people became stateless after the Soviet Union dissolved into multiple countries and their Soviet nationality ceased to exist. As well as groups affected by geographic changes, the UNHCR estimates that up to 75% of stateless people are members of minority groups, who are often explicitly discriminated against by the state they should be nationals of. An example of a stateless minority group are the Rohinga in Myanmar. While this group is best known for the intense violence it suffered and the huge refugee crisis which followed, few people know that citizenship laws passed in 1982 effectively denied the Rohinga (alongside some other minority ethnicities) the right to a nationality in Myanmar.

 

What is being done to prevent statelessness and to reduce the number of people currently stateless? The right to a nationality is enshrined in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and two United Nations international legal conventions exist to provide standards that states should stick to in order to reduce and prevent statelessness. Unfortunately, many states routinely ignore these international laws. Some success has been seen, such as with the elimination of the issue from Kyrgyzstan, where the last 13,700 people who were stateless were granted citizenship between 2014 and 2019. However, many countries maintain discriminatory laws which will be difficult to convince them to change. Last month, India changed the law to make it easier for followers of all of the subcontinent’s religions, except Islam, to acquire citizenship. At the same time, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wants to compile a register of all India’s 1.3 billion citizens, as a means to hunt down illegal immigrants. With many of the country’s 200 million Muslims not having the papers to prove that they are Indian, they risk being made stateless. Further, the government has expressed the desire to build camps to detain those that are caught. 

Increasing numbers of refugees could also lead to an increase in the numbers of stateless people. Ultimately, it will be important for states to cooperate to try to reduce and prevent statelessness – for example by reforming their citizenship laws to allow newborn children who would otherwise be stateless to acquire citizenship. Colombia is setting a great example in this regard, living up to its international obligations by granting the children of all Venezuelan refugees the right to be Colombian citizens. The UNHCR recommends countries set up statelessness determination procedures to ensure that stateless people are able to get recognised.  In order to encourage other nations to follow this example and work to help statelessness and its harms become a thing of the past, both international and domestic pressure will be necessary. The UNHCR is running a campaign, #IBelong, to raise awareness of statelessness in the hope that governments will feel the need to change their ways. We will need governments that are willing to reform their laws to prevent children from being born stateless and to increase the ease with which stateless people can naturalise. Only then will we be able to remove this major barrier to the access of basic human rights.

 

 

 

Photo by Sarah-Rose on Flickr

 

 

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