Statelessness

Resource Person: Jean-Francois Durieux

Oxford Department of International Development

University of Oxford

Oxford, UK

Email: alibabadurieux[at]gmail.com

Overview

Being a ‘stateless person’ means not having the nationality of any country. Statelessness may result from loss of nationality, owing to, e.g., marriage to a foreigner whose nationality the spouse is unable to obtain or retain; renunciation of one’s own citizenship; or political events, such as the partition of States, the creation of a new State, or the systematic ‘denationalization’ of minority groups by abusive governments. But millions of people are actually born stateless, either for ‘technical’ reasons such as lack of birth registration, or simply because their parents are themselves stateless. In almost all parts of the world, large populations are denied citizenship rights by the State in which they and their forebears have been living for generations, even though they do not have links to any other State.

While there exists an international Convention relating to the Status of Stateless People (1954), similar in many ways to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it has been ratified by only 30 States. Another multilateral treaty (the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness) as well as a few regional instruments, are aimed at preventing and reducing instances of statelessness, through the adoption of nationality laws that ‘seal the cracks’ into which persons might fall, either at birth or later in life. Despite these legal efforts, in which UNHCR also participates under a special mandate from the UN General Assembly, statelessness is an enduring phenomenon, affecting at least 11 million people worldwide today.

Refugees are not normally stateless: while they cannot rely on the protection of their country, most refugees do have a nationality. As a matter of fact, establishing the nationality of an asylum-seeker is an indispensable first step in any refugee status determination procedure, since the refugee definition (in the 1951 Convention) refers to being ‘outside the country of his nationality’ and  being ‘unable or unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country’.

However, some refugees are also stateless – and the same definition alludes to this, since it makes provision for a person who ‘not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence [...] is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it’.  As the 1951 Refugee Convention has been much more widely ratified that the 1954 Convention on Stateless Persons, and actually provides a better set of rights, stateless persons who seek refuge outside their country of former habitual residence, or who become stateless while abroad and cannot safely return to their former country, should have their refugee claims examined under the 1951 Convention.

Of course, being without a nationality does not necessarily amount to a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted’ in the sense of the 1951 Convention. However, the 1951 refugee definition covers persons who fear being persecuted on account of their nationality – and this phrase includes those whose persecution has taken the form of arbitrary deprivation of nationality. In other words, to strip a person, a family or an entire ethnic group of their nationality is a form of persecution. Besides, people who are born stateless may be subjected to all sorts of abuse and discriminatory practices in their country of habitual residence – for reasons of their ethnicity, religion or ‘just’ lack of legal identity – to the point that they are forced to leave and seek asylum in a foreign country.

Useful Links and Reports

The Equal Rights Trust

www.equalrightstrust.org

The Equal Rights Trust (ERT) is an independent international organisation whose purpose is to combat discrimination and promote equality as a fundamental human right and a basic principle of social justice. Their two year project entitled Detention of Stateless Persons resulted in the report Unravelling Anomaly: Detention, Discrimination and the Protection Needs of Stateless Persons (July 2010). The project looked at strengthening the protection of stateless persons in any kind of detention or imprisonment due at least in part to their being stateless, and to ensuring they can exercise their right to be free from arbitrary detention without discrimination.

Frontiers Ruwad (Lebanon)

www.frontiersruwad.org

FR's main activities in the refugee and statelessness arena include providing legal aid for refugees and stateless persons, legal counsel and representation thereto, monitoring the detention conditions of refugees, asylum seekers and stateless persons (particularly arbitrary detention, torture, and death in custody), and legal and policy research and publication on pertinent refugee and statelessness issues in Lebanon. The following report provides a recent picture of the situation facing the many stateless in Lebanon: -

Frontiers Ruwad, Invisible Citizens: A Legal Study of Statelessness in Lebanon, November 2009

- Full Report (Arabic)

- Executive Summary (English)

Refugees International

www.refugeesinternational.org

Refugees International is an independent, Washington-DC based non-profit organisation that advocates for lifesaving assistance and protection for displaced people and promotes solutions to displacement crises. The agency focuses on: (1) Neglected Crises; (2) Return and Reintegration; (3) Peacekeeping; (4) Internal Displacement; and (5) Statelessness.

RI’s statelessness initiative began after the 2005 release of Lives on Hold: The Human Cost of Statelessness (2005). This initiative has included visits to over a dozen countries, and continues through follow up reports like the March 2009 release of Nationality Rights for All: A Progress Report and Global Survey on Statelessness (2009).