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Refugees Magazine Issue 132: (Protection) – Statelessness: Nine million ghosts
No friends, nowhere to live, no official identity. It's not easy being stateless
When thousands of civilians fled a bloody civil war in the central Asian state of Tajikistan to neighbouring Kyrgyzstan in the early 1990s, many didn't realize they were headed for double trouble. At a stroke, some people in the exodus became not only refugees, but because of a particularly cruel stroke of timing, they were about to become stateless, too – people who do not have a country they can officially call home, civilians who are not recognized by any state as citizens.
Both countries had recently become independent following the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991. As each struggled to build a viable and fully sovereign state, Kyrgyzstan adopted a citizenship law shortly after independence, Tajikistan adopted the relevant laws in 1994. People were granted nationality in their respective country if they had permanent residence on the day each law went into force.
Civilians fleeing the Tajikistan fighting between those two dates tumbled into a legal nightmare. Though many were ethnic Kyrgyz, they arrived in that country too late to claim citizenship there. When Tajikistan introduced its own citizenship rules a little later, but at a time when many civilians were still marooned outside that country as refugees, they were unable to claim Tajik nationality, either.
Welcome to the Byzantine and often dark underworld of statelessness where people not only don't have a country to call their own or the right to a passport, but also minimal, if any, access to normal basic rights such as education, health, political choice or even the ability, without papers, to officially bury their dead. "They are non persons, political ghosts, without a legal home, a country or an identity," one statelessness expert said.
The plight of the world's 10.4 million refugees is well documented and, although the problem of displacement remains highly controversial, extensive international, regional and national legislation is in place to try to tackle this global crisis. Increasing attention is also being paid to the plight of a related group of uprooted people, the estimated 20-25 million persons displaced within their own countries, so-called IDPs.
HUGE NUMBERS
But though the number of stateless persons globally is also massive – the best educated guesstimate is that there may be nine million people effectively cast adrift from the global political system of nation states – this problem receives far less attention and is far less generally understood.
There are international instruments on statelessness. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights underlines that "Everyone has the right to a nationality." But while 145 countries have acceded to the 1951 Refugee Convention and/or its 1967 Protocol, only 55 nations have signed a 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and even fewer, 27, the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.
Because citizenship disputes sometimes trigger displacement and refugee exoduses, and other refugee-statelessness problems overlap, the U.N. General Assembly in 1974 turned to UNHCR as a natural interlocutor in the absence of any other 'dedicated' statelessness organization and asked the agency to provide limited legal assistance to stateless persons. Seven years ago it mandated UNHCR to further broaden its role to help promote the avoidance and elimination of statelessness on a global scale.
After instructing more than 1,400 of its own staff on statelessness issues, the organization helped train a global network of lawyers, judges, government and nongovernment officials. UNHCR participated directly with more than 60 governments in drafting or amending nationality laws and regional organizations such as the African Union in promoting statelessness resolutions.
Earlier this year, it queried a total of 192 countries to try for the first time to build a comprehensive global picture on statelessness: the problems countries are facing, laws and projects they have already adopted and the help they might need from UNHCR. The results will be known later this year.
From its early work in eastern and central Europe helping such groups as the descendants of 250,000 Tatars who were forcibly deported by Stalin from the Crimea in 1944, the agency has also expanded its activities to other parts of the world in need of help.
Along the roof of the world, an estimated 80,000 ethnic Nepalese fled neighbouring Bhutan more than a decade ago (the number has since risen to 112,000). The Bhutanese government has said only a tiny number among this group are Bhutanese citizens and will eventually be allowed to repatriate – the great majority will fall into the legal limbo of statelessness unless a compromise can be engineered.
Across the world in the Western Hemisphere, between 250,000-500,000 ethnic Haitians living in the Dominican Republic are in a similar situation. Children born to these Haitians or from mixed marriages between Haitians and Dominicans are often refused registration at birth – thus being deprived of any official recognition. Groups of children have periodically been rounded up and unceremoniously dumped across the border into Haiti.
During the last war between Ethiopia and Eritrea on the Horn of Africa, nearly 100,000 ethnic Eritreans were arrested by the government in Addis Ababa and bundled into Eritrea.
There are few funds or manpower resources to help these and other stateless groups. UNHCR for instance has only one full-time statelessness expert. Governments need to be sympathetic or millions of people could become permanent outcasts.
Back in Kyrgyzstan a helping hand was extended. The country has modified its citizenship law and offered many of the legally stateless refugees who had fled Tajikistan a new nationality and a new start. At least one little pocket of suffering has been eradicated.
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 132: "The Changing Face of Protection" (September 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (620Kb) here or high-resolution (1.8Mb) here
