Originally published on the CGS blog on November 17, 2014.
What would you do if you literally were not considered a person?
Today over 10 million stateless people are living that reality – a life where no state recognizes them as a part of their legal community. Our lives are intricately linked to the states into which we’re born, and our citizenship brings with it basic access to schools, health care, employment, and an extensive bundle of other rights and privileges. But because stateless people aren’t recognized as persons before the law, they don’t have access to any of these basic human rights. They’re exiled from life as we know it.
Statelessness happens in a variety of ways. The state is the basic administrative unit of global politics, but it is an imperfect unit, attempting to govern both a territory and a people, and the governments in charge of states don’t always recognize all the groups within a territory as a part of their political community, often due to ethnic, religious, or other differences. Disagreements about inclusion often happen when territories break off from an original state, with people ending up on the wrong side of a border. And as conflicts force people to flee their homes, they may lose track of their original nationality documents, or their state of origin may cease to exist altogether.
This month, the UN High Commissioner on Refugees is launching a ten-year campaign to end statelessness, to ensure that everyone, everywhere has the basic protections afforded by having a state. Some of the goals of this campaign include:
- Resolving major situations of statelessness, such as the Rohingya in Burma or people of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic, through law and policy reform;
- Ensuring that no child is born stateless;
- Preventing deprivation of nationality on the basis of discrimination;
- Removing gender discrimination in nationality laws;
- Granting protection status to stateless migrants;
- Issuing nationality identification documentation to those entitled to it.
This will not be an easy campaign. States are in some ways fundamentally exclusionary entities: they have to decide who is and is not a member as a routine matter of differentiating among one another, picking who has this set of rights and who has that set of rights within each territory. But illegitimate forms of discrimination get included in laws and practices too easily; conflict, natural disaster, and border changes can easily put people in unexpected places that aren’t legally prepared for them.
Two UN conventions on statelessness help to protect the rights of these individuals, but neither has been widely adopted. The 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons currently has only 84 state parties as of today; the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness has just 61. There are 193 member states in the United Nations.
The United States is a signatory to neither convention.
And while the US political climate may seem antagonistic toward international law, the United States can still be a significant contributor to the campaign to end statelessness. Sri Lanka, Kyrgyzstan, and Vietnam, among others, have implemented programs to integrate stateless populations, and the US can be a key part of the UNHCR’s campaign to help current problem states integrate their own populations.
And perhaps most importantly, the global political community should recommit to resolving international conflict quickly and peacefully. This is easier said than done, obviously, but the conflicts currently dispersed around the world have serious long-term consequences. A stateless refugee today may have children who are the stateless of tomorrow; in fact, one-third of today’s stateless are children. The sooner we can calm this conflict pandemic, the sooner we stop the cycle of statelessness.
