Latest news feedRefugees Magazine Issue 147 ("The Excluded: The strange hidden world of the stateless") - In the shadows
Millions seek to escape the grim world of the stateless
by Philippe Leclerc and Rupert Colville
"To be stripped of citizenship is to be stripped of worldliness; it is like returning to a wilderness as cavemen or savages... they could live and die without leaving any trace." Hannah Arendt "The Origins of Totalitarianism" |
Unlike the philosopher Hannah Arendt (who was stateless for 16 years but still had an immensely successful career), most stateless people are – almost by definition – anonymous. People who live in the shadows at the edge of society. People with no chance of a career at all.
Stateless people can be found in all the corners of the planet – in developed as well as developing countries. And there are many ways to become stateless. Some are stateless because of actions taken long ago, and other stateless people are being born – or created by mistake – every day.
Stripped of their rights
Some people – like Hannah Arendt, who lost her German citizenship after fleeing the Nazis in 1933, or the Feili Kurds who were expelled from Saddam Hussein's Iraq – become stateless as a result of official decrees deliberately aimed at excluding them from any meaningful role in society, or at driving them out of the country, or (in the case of Europe's Jews in the Nazi era) as a prelude to an attempt to exterminate them altogether.
Perversely, on occasion it can even be the development of democracy that stimulates the omission of a particular group from the list of nationals – because of the fear of those in charge that the group in question, or some prominent individuals among them, will side with the political opposition.
Groups who, for one reason or another, were left out of the body of recognized citizens when their state was first constituted, or reformed, include the Muslims of Northern Rakhine State in Myanmar (also known as Rohingyas); some hill tribes in Thailand; the Bidoon in the Gulf States; the Lhotshampas from Bhutan, the Madhesis in Nepal and various nomadic groups around the world.
And then, of course, there are the Palestinians, many of whom became stateless refugees during the tumultuous upheaval surrounding the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Kafkaesque
Other people do not have (or lose) their nationality, because of the unintentional side-effects of badly designed laws, poor birth registration systems, other administrative oversights, or simply because of a clash of different legislations in different states.
The results for the people concerned are often shattering. Through no fault of their own, some people – including the 24 year-old woman whose desperate plea from her detention cell is shown on the left – may end up losing their liberty because their parents infringed immigration rules when they were a small child. They may then stay locked up for an indefinite period because there is no state that accepts them as citizens.
Sometimes children are born stateless, and stay stateless all their lives. As such, they may be unable to go to school or university, work legally, own property, get married, or travel. They may find it difficult to enter hospital, impossible to open a bank account, and have no chance of receiving a pension.
If someone robs them or rapes them, they may find they cannot lodge a complaint, because legally they do not exist, and the police require proof that they do before they can open an investigation. They are extremely vulnerable to exploitation as cheap or bonded labour, especially in societies where they cannot work legally.
Then, as if all that were not enough, many stateless people are condemned to pass on their statelessness to their own children – as if it were some sort of genetic disease.
At one end of the spectrum, some groups of state-less people are able to exercise most of their basic rights – for example half a million people belonging to Russian-speaking minorities in Latvia and Estonia, who are nevertheless still deprived of their democratic right to vote.
But for many stateless people around the world, it is a corrosive, soul-destroying condition that colours almost every aspect of their lives.
A stateless woman called Chen, who once found herself stuck in no-man's land between two of her possible countries of nationality, describes what it feels like.
"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. 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."
Rejected by history
There are hundreds of thousands of people who remain stateless today because of some upheaval in a country that has changed political shape, or because they fell into a black hole created by an expiring empire.
Groups who became stateless after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, for example, include some of the Kurdish populations who moved to Syria from other parts of the empire.
When Syria carried out a census in 1962, some 300,000 Kurds were left without any nationality. In certain instances, some members of a family received citizenship while others did not (with the latter remaining stateless ever since).
Such groups may gain some hope from developments in Sri Lanka where, thanks to a new law passed in 2003 (almost two centuries after they were first brought over from British India), hundreds of thousands of Hill Tamils can now obtain citizenship through a simple declaration. And an even more impressive breakthrough has recently taken place in Nepal where, as a welcome by-product of the peace process, a remarkable 2. 6 million previously stateless individuals were issued with citizenship certificates in just four months in early 2007.
Changing states
States continue to change shape and continue to make certain groups stateless in the process. Perhaps the most spectacular example in recent years was the break up of a single state – the USSR – into 15 separate successor states. In December 1991, Soviet citizenship ceased to exist, leaving 287 million people in need of a new identity.
As a result of this unprecedented political earthquake, an estimated 54-65 million people suddenly found themselves living "abroad." Many were eventually able to sort out their situation, but some with links to two states found themselves citizens of neither, including many ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians living in Central Asia and the Baltics (see story above).
The subsequent upheavals in Central and Eastern Europe, and splitting up of states such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, also led to the emergence of new stateless groups – particularly among the Roma and other minorities.
For example, several thousand people in the world's most recent new state – Montenegro (which became independent of Serbia in 2006) – are believed to be at risk of statelessness because of complications linked to the Kosovo crisis.
Another post-Yugoslav legislative quirk snared several thousand people in Slovenia who were removed from the country's registry of residents in 1992, and either were not aware of, or failed to take advantage of, a short period of grace when they could have applied for citizenship of the new state of Slovenia. They have become known as "the erased cases."
The international response
Between the two World Wars, there were a number of efforts to codify responses to statelessness in specific situations (for example for the Armenians and other minorities from the Ottoman empire, and for the so-called White Russians who fled to Western Europe, China and North Africa after the 1917 Russian revolution).
These early international agreements usually referred to both refugees and the stateless. Rather than aiming to solve the problem of statelessness, such agreements were geared more to practical matters such as enabling stateless people to use the famous Nansen travel documents, also used by refugees.
As a result, a lot of people like Hannah Arendt remained stateless for many years, but were not necessarily totally trapped by their condition in the way they probably would be today. Ironically, in a supposedly more globalized world, it can be more difficult for a stateless person to travel between countries nowadays than it was in the 1930s.
In 1949, with millions of refugees and stateless people still milling around a shattered Europe, the United Nations appointed a committee to "consider preparing a revised and consolidated convention relating to the international status of refugees and stateless persons..." In the end, the work of the committee resulted in the drafting of two separate conventions: the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, and the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons.
The 1954 stateless convention provides a legal status for someone not considered as a national under the laws of any state. Seven years later, a second statelessness convention was added – the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness – in an attempt to prevent or cure some of the root causes of statelessness.
The main problem with both conventions is the small number of states that have ratified them: 62 countries in the case of the 1954 Convention, and just 33 in the case of the 1961 Convention.
Article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to a nationality – but it does not specify which state should grant its nationality, nor in what circumstances. However, some key international treaties which have been ratified by most states – like the un Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) – lay down obligations for states which, if applied, should prevent statelessness.
Article 7 of the CRC says that states should systematically register children at birth, and that they should be provided with a nationality. Other international instruments, such as the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as treaties tackling racial discrimination and discrimination against women, contain provisions designed to prevent the arbitrary deprivation, or denial, of nationality for individuals.
The importance of registering births is graphically illustrated by the situation of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, where there are believed to be hundreds of thousands of stateless people. Although the country's constitution states that all children born on the territory automatically acquire nationality (except those born to foreigners 'in transit'), the failure to register births has meant that many are left stateless as they cannot show where they were born or who their parents are. The problem particularly affects descendants of migrant labourers from neighbouring Haiti. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found in 2005 that existing practice was discriminatory and ordered the Government to register all births in the country.
UNHCR's role
Because refugee and statelessness problems often overlap, the UN General Assembly gave UNHCR a mandate to deal with statelessness in 1974. The agency was specifically charged with providing legal assistance to the stateless and helping to promote the avoidance and reduction of statelessness globally.
Though its early work was mainly confined to eastern and central Europe, in recent years UNHCR has expanded its activities to Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres, in a 2006 address to UNHCR's governing board, stressed that it was necessary to boost efforts to find solutions: "We were able to resolve statelessness situations with practical assistance in the Ukraine, FYR Macedonia, and Sri Lanka by helping hundreds of thousands of stateless individuals obtain a nationality, and are now involved in a meaningful cooperation programme with the Russian Federation. But such success stories have been too rare. We want to change that." He proposed a concerted programme of cooperation with other specialized agencies – for example birth registration campaigns with UNICEF – as the best way forward. UNHCR is also linking up with various other agencies, including UNFPA, to continue the vital process of cataloguing stateless people through the organization of joint censuses with states.
The lawmakers
"The best way for parliamentarians to demonstrate their determination to reduce or eliminate statelessness," said Anders B. Johnsson, Secretary General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), "is by ensuring that the issue is addressed politically in parliament, that appropriate national laws are adopted and that governments are held to account."
UNHCR and the IPU are continuing to urge states to introduce nationality legislation to prevent statelessness, and the two organizations jointly produced a handbook for parliamentarians that provides practical advice for drafting citizenship laws.
Chile provides an encouraging example of how statelessness can be solved through decisive action by determined parliamentarians."Children born to Chileans abroad used to be in a very unjust situation," explained Isabel Allende, daughter of a former president and Member of Congress."In order for them to acquire Chilean nationality, they had to come to Chile and live here for an entire year. This meant that many children born to Chileans in exile were stateless – because they simply were not in a position to return to Chile."
Isabel Allende was one of those who pushed for a change in the law (which had been brought in by the Pinochet regime), and in 2005 a constitutional reform was passed by parliament. Now, she said, "simply by virtue of being born to a Chilean father or mother, the child can be registered at a consulate and is immediately granted Chilean nationality." Meanwhile, legislators in nearby Brazil are focusing on legislation to address a very similar problem there.
Legal tripwires
A few slight slip-ups in the framing of a citizenship law can have extraordinary repercussions – as Canadians have been finding out to their bewilderment.
New us travel regulations in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks mean that Canadians now need a passport to cross a previously relaxed border. Some of the thousands of people applying for a passport (or their pensions), were informed they were not Canadian. As the cases proliferated, so did the number of legal tripwires they exposed (mostly linked to some unfortunate interplay between previously obscure elements of the 1947 Citizenship Act and its 1977 amendment).
Canadians began discovering they were in fact technically not Canadians because they were the children of Canadian soldiers who married overseas. Or because they themselves were born abroad (including adults whose mothers had popped across the border to an American hospital to give birth because it was closer than the nearest Canadian hospital – for many years a common and accepted practice). Or because at some point their father had moved to the us to work and had taken out us citizenship, not realizing that this action affected his entire family.
According to the law as it stood between 1947 and 1977, Canadians born abroad who were not residing in Canada on their 24th birthday, were obliged to fill out a form saying they wished to keep their citizenship. Unfortunately it seems some were never informed of this or various other requirements.
One woman described the last scenario to a Parliamentary Standing Committee: "I am Barbara Porteous. I am a Canadian. Canada says no, you are a 70-year-old woman without a country. On February 2 last year, I applied for a replacement citizenship card to facilitate applying for a passport. On 31 July, I received a letter from Citizenship and Immigration that stated: 'You ceased to be a citizen June 14, 1960, the day following your 24th birthday, as you were not residing in Canada on that date, nor had you applied to retain your citizenship prior to that date.'"
Perhaps the strangest category of all includes those who discover they are not citizens because their grandfathers or great grandfathers were born out of wedlock. This seems to have hit the descendants of a Canadian Mennonite community in Mexico particularly badly (the authorities in Mexico at that time refused to recognize their marriages).
The Canadian authorities, taken aback by the plethora of problems that have suddenly emerged, have tabled a citizenship bill for the autumn of 2007. In May, Canada's Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Diane Finley highlighted the key areas that will be covered by the new legislation: anyone born or naturalized in Canada on or after January 1, 1947 will have citizenship even if they had lost it under a provision of the 1947 Canadian Citizenship Act, she said. And anyone born outside the country to a Canadian parent – whether married or not – after 1947, will also be citizens – so long as they are the first generation born abroad.
But malfunctioning laws are often not so easily untangled. Each case has to be examined in depth and that takes time. And new laws take time to draft – otherwise they may just make a bad situation worse. Law-makers need to be very alert. If it can happen in Canada, it can happen anywhere.
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 147: "The Excluded: The strange hidden world of the stateless"
(September 2007). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (1.9 Mb) here or high-resolution (6.8 Mb) here.
