Since 2014, when UNHCR launched the #IBelong campaign, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has made significant strides in resolving the issue of statelessness, reducing the number of stateless persons, or those who do not have citizenship.
Since 2014, when UNHCR launched the #IBelong campaign, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has made significant strides in resolving the issue of statelessness, reducing the number of stateless persons, or those who do not have citizenship.
Statelessness has a negative impact on the lives of individuals. Possession of citizenship is necessary for full participation in society and is a prerequisite for the realization of a range of human rights such as the right to health, education, and marriage. In addition, stateless persons give birth to stateless children.
Statelessness occurs for a variety of reasons including conflict of laws, administrative practices, discrimination, lack of birth registration, and revocation of citizenship and renunciation. It also occurs as a result of the break-up of states, one of the most common reasons for stateless persons in BiH.
Today, statelessness is still a significant problem affecting 10 million people worldwide who do not have citizenship and are therefore in legal limbo.
There is a relatively small amount of cases of statelessness in BiH in comparison to the rest of the world.
According to UNHCR estimates, there are currently less than 100 people at risk of statelessness in BiH, including those who are not registered.
Roma make up the majority of stateless persons or unregistered persons and this is mostly due to the lack of necessary documentation.
As UNHCR Representative in BiH Lucie Gagné told FENA, the most common reasons for statelessness are lack of access to birth registration, late birth registration, and shortcomings in national laws governing the issue. But while these are the most common reasons, dissolutions of states or the creation of new states are also reasons why a person is left stateless.
When it comes to BiH, Gagné notes that due to the dissolution of the former state and the war, many people fled BiH, and when they returned with children born abroad, they did not have documentation to confirm the date of birth which became a major problem.
With the help of the partner organization “Vaša prava BiH,” UNHCR provided legal assistance to stateless persons and since 2008, a total of 1,770 persons have been assisted in the process of registration of births and citizenships, and obtaining all necessary identification documents to request or confirm their citizenship.
“It was a big step forward and with the help of all stakeholders and institutions within BiH, we have made great progress in this regard. It is estimated that there are now about a hundred people in BiH who do not have citizenship, but this is only an estimate because they have not been registered and we do not have accurate data,” explained Gagné.
Most of them are from minority communities, primarily Roma, but Gagné said that with the help of various state institutions, an attempt is being made to resolve this issue for the remaining stateless persons in the coming years. It would be a success for the country, but also an example for the region that could be followed.
As she emphasized, cooperation with BiH institutions has had a high level of success so far, but this extra effort is needed to be able to say that the problem has been fully resolved.
“BiH is in a very good position when it comes to that, but it is difficult to compare it with other countries precisely because of the lack of records. It is difficult to know the exact number of stateless persons. More than 76 countries in the world have reported about 4.2 million stateless people,” Gagné said.
Over the past six years, ever since the #IBelong campaign was launched, some 350,000 people have managed to resolve the issue of citizenship in a number of countries. Gagné pointed out that BiH has shown great commitment to this issue.
Speaking about the ten-year #IBelong campaign, which aims to resolve the issue of stateless persons by 2024, Gagné recalled that the campaign was launched in 2014, in cooperation with states, civil society and international organizations aiming to prevent, identify and reduce the number of stateless persons.
“The basic thing that UNHCR advocates for is achieving a zero number of stateless persons by 2024. Many countries have ratified two conventions on these issues. One refers to the definition of what it means to be a stateless person, and the other concerns the reduction of the number of such persons,” Gagné added.
Also, since the start of the campaign, some states have made plans to achieve this, while others have amended national laws to fill loopholes in the laws and address the issue, and some have legally committed to establishing a status of statelessness, which can help to identify the number of such persons in their respective countries in order to take action.
Gagné emphasized that a lot has been done in the six years of implementation of that campaign, and BiH is a good example when it comes to progress if you look at what the situation was like at the start and what we have today, six years later.
When it comes to the BiH legal framework governing this issue, it is very good and is largely in line with international standards.
“However, there are other challenges BiH is facing and the biggest problem is how to respond to challenges when children are not registered in the birth register on time, because when parents plan for it to be done later, then it becomes a very demanding process. There is also a problem when a child is not born in a hospital. In that case, there is no documentation on the date and time of the child’s birth,” explained Gagné.
Another problem comes from human errors because sometimes birth registration has errors and then there is the problem of how to fix those errors, and there is the issue of disposition of responsibilities among different level of authorities within BiH.
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