The hidden world of stateless people by António Guterres and Louise Arbour

28 November 2007

Up to 15 million people are stateless. That is the population of a medium-sized country, about the same size as the populations of Chile and Cambodia. Yet hardly anyone is aware of the scale of the problem, or even of what it means to be “stateless.”
It is a corrosive, soul-destroying condition that can colour almost every aspect of a person’s life. People who are not recognised as citizens of any state may be unable to enjoy a whole range of basic human rights.
They may be unable to go to school, work legally, own property, get married or travel. They may find it difficult to enter a hospital or impossible to open a bank account; they have no chance of receiving a pension. Officially, very often they do not even have a name.
When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948, the right to have a nationality was included, precisely because, as Eleanor Roosevelt noted, that provision was of “vital importance.” 
But the declaration, which outlines broad principles, does not say which state must grant nationality, nor in what circumstances. And, as the numbers show, many states have not done a very good job of sorting this out for themselves.
There are many causes, some accidental, some intended. When states disappear or are created, some groups and individuals may be left out, a fate that suddenly befell millions of individuals in 1991 when the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 separate countries.
People may also end up stateless as the result of raging or unresolved conflicts. Or they may be stateless because their parents and grandparents were, with the condition handed down from generation to generation like a genetic disease. 
Poorly drafted laws or administrative oversights, or an incompatibility between the laws of two different states, may also lead to statelessness.
More often than not, discrimination plays a role. It is no coincidence that many stateless people also belong to racial, linguistic or religious minorities. Others are born stateless because in some countries women do not have the right to pass on nationality to their children. 
Perversely, even the development of democracy can stimulate the omission of certain groups or individuals from the list of citizens because of fears they may vote for the “wrong” party, or because they are considered “foreign.”
And before long, climate change may join the mix. If, as feared, the first island states sink beneath the waves in a few decades’ time (among those considered especially vulnerable are Tuvalu and Kiribati), it is inconceivable that their citizens will be left to drown. 
But all the institutions of a modern nation state — parliaments, police, lawcourts, state education and health care - will have disappeared along with the coral atolls, sandy beaches and palm trees.
The islanders will either have to find a way to reconstitute their vanished state elsewhere, or they will have to find another state to adopt them as citizens, give them a passport and provide them with all the other forms of protection and assistance that a state owes to its people. Alternatively, they too will be added to the list of the stateless.
But there are some currents of fresh air blowing through the strange, hidden world of the stateless. 
There have been recent political and legislative breakthroughs for large groups of stateless people in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and, above all, in Nepal, where 2.6 million people were issued with citizenship certificates in just four months earlier this year.
In Vietnam, the process of naturalising former refugees originating from Cambodia is now getting under way. And in Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Indonesia, human rights campaigns and a progressive approach by lawmakers have led to recent reforms allowing women to transmit nationality to their children. 
Chile and Brazil have both revised their constitutions in order to reduce statelessness, and Rwanda, New Zealand and Brazil recently joined the very small club of states (there are now 34) that have signed the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.
The easiest and most effective way to deal with statelessness is to prevent it from occurring in the first place. 
One of the surest methods is to guarantee that individuals born on a state’s territory have the right to that state’s nationality if they would not obtain any other (as opposed to restricting nationality to children born to established citizens). 
At the very least, all states should ratify and comply with human rights instruments designed to prevent discrimination against non-citizens, so as to alleviate some of the most disastrous effects of statelessness.
Tackling statelessness head on is a priority for both the UN agencies we head. The issue of statelessness has been left to fester in the shadows for far too long. It is time to take the necessary steps to rid the world of a bureaucratic malaise that is, in reality, not so difficult to resolve. It is simply a question of political will and legislative energy.
António Guterres is the UN high commissioner for refugees and Louise Arbour is the UN high commissioner for human rights