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New handbook on statelessness addresses 11 million "forgotten" people

News Stories, 20 October 2005

© UNHCR/J.Redden
A few months after this picture was taken in 2004, this ethnic Kyrgyz family who fled Tajikistan's 1993 civil war was granted Kyrgyz citizenship. Millions of other stateless people elsewhere are not so fortunate, and remain stateless for generations.

GENEVA, October 20 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) this week launched a practical handbook for parliamentarians to address nationality and statelessness, phenomena which adversely affect the lives of millions of men, women and children around the world.

A stateless person is someone who is not recognized by any country as a citizen. There are an estimated 11 million people in the world in this situation. They are effectively trapped in a legal limbo, enjoying minimal or no access to national or international legal protection or to such basic rights as health and education. Stateless people have been described as "the ultimate forgotten people."

Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish philosopher and refugee, had strong feelings on the subject, no doubt as a result of her own experience of statelessness after fleeing Nazi Germany: "To be stripped of citizenship is to be stripped of worldliness; it is like returning to a wilderness as cavemen or savages," she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. "... They could live and die without leaving any trace, without having contributed anything to the common world."

Arendt ended up a U.S. citizen, but many less fortunate people are born stateless and remain stateless until the day they die.

Lara, a formerly stateless woman, describes the corrosive effect of statelessness on the morale of the individual: "Being said 'No' to by the country where I live; being said 'No' to by the country where I was born; being said 'No' to by the country where my parents are from; hearing 'you do not belong to us' continuously! I feel I am nobody and don't even know why I'm living. Being stateless, you are always surrounded by a sense of worthlessness."

The handbook for parliamentarians, which was launched during a panel discussion on nationality and statelessness at the 113th Assembly of the IPU in Geneva, suggests practical steps and concrete actions to prevent or solve situations of statelessness.

The preferred solution is the acquisition of an effective nationality, a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among recent successful examples are the granting of Sri Lankan nationality to more than 190,000 Estate Tamils in 2004, and the recent acquisition of citizenship by ethnic Albanians and Roma in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In both of these situations, UNHCR worked with the authorities to promote access to citizenship.

International conventions on statelessness were established in 1954 (Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons) and 1961 (Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness). As the UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres pointed out during the launch of the handbook, the importance of the 1954 Convention lies in the fact that it provides basic rights to people in a situation where they lack access to these rights, and that is one of the reasons why accession to this treaty is so crucial.

"All stateless persons should have the chance of gaining an effective nationality," Guterres said. "Refugees make the headlines as they are the visible victims of persecution and conflicts. The plight of stateless persons is in many ways similar, but they are almost invisible."

Besides High Commissioner Guterres, speakers at the panel included the First Vice-President of the Chilean National Congress, Mr. Alejandro Navarro; the Director of the Innocenti Research Centre of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Ms. Marta Santo Pais; and Mr. Gerard-René de Groot, a professor at the University of Maastricht. The discussion was moderated by UNHCR's Director of International Protection, Erika Feller.

UNHCR welcomed announcements made by parliamentary delegations from Egypt and Morocco about the introduction of new laws in their countries which allow the acquisition of nationality by children from both parents on an equal basis.

A key measure to prevent statelessness suggested in the handbook is to ensure that all children are registered at birth.

"Millions of children are never registered at birth," said Philippe Leclerc, head of UNHCR's Statelessness Unit. "The effects of this bureaucratic failure can be catastrophic for the individual child. It can make them much more vulnerable to trafficking and other forms of exploitation. It can ruin their entire lives. And it is avoidable."

With this joint publication, UNHCR and the IPU hope that Parliaments will take appropriate action to address situations which so far have remained unsolved. Two examples – among many others – are those of the Biharis in Bangladesh and that of the Bidoon in the Persian Gulf region.

In 1974, and in subsequent resolutions, the UN General Assembly mandated the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as the agency responsible for promoting the reduction of statelessness and the enjoyment of basic rights by stateless people.

Established in 1889 and with its Headquarters in Geneva, the IPU is the oldest multilateral political organization, currently bringing together 141 affiliated parliaments and seven associated regional assemblies.

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Statelessness in Kyrgyzstan

Two decades after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, thousands of people in former Soviet republics like Kyrgyzstan are still facing problems with citizenship. UNHCR has identified more than 20,000 stateless people in the Central Asian nation. These people are not considered as nationals under the laws of any country. While many in principle fall under the Kyrgyz citizenship law, they have not been confirmed as nationals under the existing procedures.

Most of the stateless people in Kyrgyzstan have lived there for many years, have close family links in the country and are culturally and socially well-integrated. But because they lack citizenship documents, these folk are often unable to do the things that most people take for granted, including registering a marriage or the birth of a child, travelling within Kyrgyzstan and overseas, receiving pensions or social allowances or owning property. The stateless are more vulnerable to economic hardship, prone to higher unemployment and do not enjoy full access to education and medical services.

Since independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan has taken many positive steps to reduce and prevent statelessness. And UNHCR, under its statelessness mandate, has been assisting the country by providing advice on legislation and practices as well as giving technical assistance to those charged with solving citizenship problems. The refugee agency's NGO partners provide legal counselling to stateless people and assist them in their applications for citizenship.

However, statelessness in Kyrgyzstan is complex and thousands of people, mainly women and children, still face legal, administrative and financial hurdles when seeking to confirm or acquire citizenship. In 2009, with the encouragement of UNHCR, the government adopted a national action plan to prevent and reduce statelessness. In 2011, the refugee agency will help revise the plan and take concrete steps to implement it. A concerted effort by all stakeholders is needed so that statelessness does not become a lingering problem for future generations.

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Statelessness in Viet Nam

Viet Nam's achievements in granting citizenship to thousands of stateless people over the last two years make the country a global leader in ending and preventing statelessness.

Left stateless after the 1975 collapse of the bloody Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, nearly 1,400 former Cambodian refugees received citizenship in Viet Nam in 2010, the culmination of five years of cooperation between the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Vietnamese government. Most of the former refugees have lived in Viet Nam since 1975, all speak Vietnamese and have integrated fully. Almost 1,000 more are on track to get their citizenship in the near future. With citizenship comes the all-important family registration book that governs all citizens' interactions with the government in Viet Nam, as well as a government identification card. These two documents allow the new citizens to purchase property, attend universities and get health insurance and pensions. The documents also allow them to do simple things they could not do before, such as own a motorbike.

Viet Nam also passed a law in 2009 to restore citizenship to Vietnamese women who became stateless in the land of their birth after they married foreign men, but divorced before getting foreign citizenship for them and their children.

UNHCR estimates that up to 12 million people around the world are currently stateless.

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Statelessness among Brazilian Expats

Irina was born in 1998 in Switzerland, daughter of a Brazilian mother and her Swiss boyfriend. Soon afterwards, her mother Denise went to the Brazilian Consulate in Geneva to get a passport for Irina. She was shocked when consular officials told her that under a 1994 amendment to the constitution, children born overseas to Brazilians could not automatically gain citizenship. To make matters worse,the new-born child could not get the nationality of her father at birth either. Irina was issued with temporary travel documents and her mother was told she would need to sort out the problem in Brazil.

In the end, it took Denise two years to get her daughter a Brazilian birth certificate, and even then it was not regarded as proof of nationality by the authorities. Denise turned for help to a group called Brasileirinhos Apátridas (Stateless Young Brazilians), which was lobbying for a constitutional amendment to guarantee nationality for children born overseas with at least one Brazilian parent.

In 2007, Brazil's National Congress approved a constitutional amendment that dropped the requirement of residence in Brazil for receiving citizenship. In addition to benefitting Irina, the law helped an estimated 200,000 children, who would have otherwise been left stateless and without many of thebasic rights that citizens enjoy. Today, children born abroad to Brazilian parents automatically receive Brazilian nationality at birth.

"As a mother it was impossible to accept that my daughter wasn't considered Brazilian like me and her older brother, who was also born in Switzerland before the 1994 constitutional change," said Denise. "For me, the fact that my daughter would depend on a tourist visa to live in Brazil was an aberration."

Irina shares her mother's discomfort. "It's quite annoying when you feel you belong to a country and your parents only speak to you in that country's language, but you can't be recognized as a citizen of that country. It feels like they are stealing your childhood," the 12-year-old said.

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