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CHAPTER 2

Statelessness

A stateless person is someone who is like a ghost—they are invisible to all the things we take for granted.

—UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Barbara Hendricks

Historical and Contemporary Statelessness

Statelessness is not a new phenomenon. People have been displaced from formal belonging in the state in various ways since the 1800s. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, individuals were rendered stateless as a form of punishment for criminal activities or because they were deemed threats to social order.¹ Even today, many countries’ laws allow for denaturalization of an individual if he or she is deemed a threat to “social order.” It was not until the twentieth century, however, that statelessness became a group, as opposed to an individual, problem.² With the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, groups of people found themselves stateless when they were prevented from acquiring citizenship in the newly formed states. Hannah Arendt, herself a stateless person for many years, called this group the Heimatlosen, the “oldest group of stateless people” ([1948] 2004, 353).³ Jews were the primary group affected by these events, although other minority groups, such as Armenians and Roma, were also affected.

The establishment of totalitarian regimes of different persuasions added to the growing number of stateless persons in Europe during the early to mid-twentieth century. “Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 343). Individuals fleeing Communism in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, for example, were summarily denationalized and many of those fleeing Fascist Italy, Japan, and Germany were also rendered stateless (Torpey 2000, 124–26). While Jews and Armenians “showed the highest proportion of statelessness” from such discriminatory denationalization procedures during this time (Arendt [1948] 2004, 358; see also 367), “Trotskyites,” Spanish Republicans, and other political enemies were also targeted (343). In fact, Marc Vishniak lists the following groups as affected by statelessness during this period:

Armenians who had escaped from Kurdish and Turkish massacres; Russians who had fled from the Soviet Union; the inhabitants of the Saar who had voted for France or for the League of Nations at the time of the Saar plebiscite; the Assyro-Chaldeans and Assyrians who had left Iraq after the massacres in that country; the Jews, democrats and socialists who had fled Nazi Germany; Austrian Jews, monarchists, democrats and socialists; Rumanians who opposed the dictatorship, and Rumanian Jews; anti-Fascist Italians and Italian Jews; Spanish Republicans, Czechoslovakian democrats, etc. After the outbreak of the war Poles, Norwegians, Netherlanders, Belgians, Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Estonians, Lithuanians and others joined their ranks. (Vishniak 1945, 34)

During this time of economic decline, “disintegration” and “hatred” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 342), statelessness became a pervasive, and serious, problem. Arendt likened statelessness to being expelled “from humanity altogether” (377). Once individuals no longer belonged formally to some state through citizenship, they became “outlaw(s)” (360, 363) and “barbarians” (384) whose only way of escaping from their political and legal nonexistence was either to commit a crime or to demonstrate some sort of genius (364). In a world of sovereign states, premised as it was and continues to be on individuals belonging formally to some state, Arendt argued that the stateless represented a possible regression from civilization (382). They were—and still are—liminal subjects, caught in the space of the “betwixt and between” that lies outside states’ nationality classifications.⁴

Although the exact number of stateless persons during this period is unknown, and although the stateless were a diverse lot, Arendt’s account describes certain commonalities among them. First, statelessness was largely the result of denaturalization and denationalization campaigns. That is, individuals became stateless because they were stripped of citizenship ([1948] 2004, 353–54, 365, 577), often on political grounds, not because they were born into statelessness, as occurs in The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere today.

Second, also in contrast to the present era, statelessness was associated with border-crossings. The stateless were arrivals from elsewhere (Arendt ([1948] 2004, 341, 352, 356) and therefore had a country of origin: “Nonrecognition of statelessness always means repatriation, i.e., deportation to a country of origin” (355). As I illustrate in this book, however, the stateless today do not necessarily have a country of origin to which to be deported and the majority do not cross international borders to escape persecution.

Third, loss of citizenship entailed the loss of rights: the right to a home (Arendt ([1948] 2004, 372), the right to government protection and a legal status (373, 577), the right to an identity (364–65), the right to belong to a community (375, 377) and, in some instances, the right to life (375). Without citizenship, they “lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human” (380).⁵ Of all the rights violations that the stateless suffered during this time, Arendt felt that the loss of a community to which to belong was the gravest, as it led to the deprivation of all other rights. “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion … but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever” (375).

As noted in Chapter 1, Arendt consequently insisted on the “right to have rights,” which comprised the “right to belong to some kind of organized community” where one’s opinion and actions mattered and one’s rights could be guaranteed (376, 377). It was because Arendt believed that human rights rested not on some sort of inherent human dignity,⁶ but rather on belonging as an equal to a political community,⁷ she insisted that “man as man has only one right that transcends his various rights as a citizen: the right never to be excluded from the rights granted by his community” (628).

While much has changed since Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism more than sixty years ago—human rights have become part and parcel of international and local discourses, many governments incorporate such rights into their legislation and policies, and UNHCR has taken on the mandate of preventing and reducing statelessness globally—statelessness persists. UNHCR’s Statistical Online Population Database has data on just over 3.49 million stateless people in seventy states (UNHCR 2015b), but the agency estimates that more than ten million people are de jure stateless worldwide (2012b). It admits, however, that it has a “tough task determining the true number of stateless people” (2012b n. pag.) and others surmise that the problem of “de jure statelessness is overshadowed by an even greater crisis of de facto statelessness” (Adjami and Harrington 2008, 107).

UNHCR defines de facto stateless persons as those who are “outside the country of their nationality who are unable or, for valid reasons, are unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country” (Massey 2010, 61). Other perspectives exist, however. For instance, in some cases de facto statelessness is described as the condition of being unable to prove one’s nationality. This may result because an individual’s birth is never registered, or because he or she is an undocumented migrant or a trafficked person, or because identity documents are purposely destroyed.⁸ In other cases, de facto statelessness is defined as the lack of “effective” citizenship, which can mean a lack of government protection⁹ or the inability to enjoy rights.¹⁰ Additionally, in the more recent climate change work on statelessness, UNHCR asserts that those people who lose their state of citizenship due to rising sea levels could be rendered de facto stateless (Park 2011, 14).¹¹ The number of stateless persons, de jure and de facto, therefore, may be very high globally at present (and in the future).

Although I focus on the Caribbean in this book, stateless people are found in all areas of the world: from Central Asia to Western Europe and the African Great Lakes. The majority of stateless persons are found in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South and South East Asia, however (see Figure 1). The number of known stateless populations in these latter areas ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions and includes individuals of Russian descent in Estonia and Latvia, certain national minorities in the Russian Federation, Bidoon in Kuwait,¹² Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon, highland tribes in Thailand, Rohingya¹³ in Myanmar, and Lhotshampas in Bhutan, among others.¹⁴ Figure 1, which does not capture the stateless populations in states for which data are unavailable (such as Australia, The Bahamas, Canada, or South Africa), presents the scope of UNHCR’s known stateless populations.

Causes of Statelessness

When statelessness became a prominent international concern during the World War II era, it was in the context of geopolitical upheaval, war, and genocide. Groups of people, once recognized as nationals of a given state, were stripped of their citizenship, often on a discriminatory basis. Statelessness as a result of arbitrary denationalization policies did not vanish when the war ended or when the UDHR proclaimed in Article 15 that everyone has a right to a nationality and not to be arbitrarily deprived of it, however. In fact, the “Deprivation or denial of nationality based on discriminatory practices, particularly against racial, ethnic or religious minorities … is perhaps the most important cause of statelessness worldwide” today (Manly 2007, 256). In Chapters 3 and 4, I explain how statelessness is generated on these grounds in the specific contexts of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic.

Figure 1. De jure statelessness, 2012. Migration Policy Institute Data Hub, 2015.

Many of those who are denied or deprived of citizenship on discriminatory grounds are found in democratizing regimes or in newly formed states that are still in the process of nation building. For example, democratization has had the “effect of triggering an obsession with belonging” in Africa (Geschiere 2009, 6). Consequently, from Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon to Zambia and Zimbabwe, people have been turned into “foreigners” in their own country because they are not deemed “autochthonous” to the state.¹⁵ The process of denationalizing citizens often occurs around election time. Thus, in Cameroon, “Belonging has become a choice weapon for manipulating elections” (52). The NGO Citizenship Rights in Africa, a group that seeks to end statelessness on the continent, records how black Africans in Mauritania, Nubians in Kenya, and various groups in Côte d’Ivoire have been denationalized around election time because they represent political competition.¹⁶ Similarly, OSJI observed that “the advent of multi-party democracy in many African States in the 1990s heightened the political significance of distinguishing citizens from noncitizens, and led to a marked increase in attempts to denationalise political opponents or even entire ethnic and social groups” (cited in Kanengoni 2008, 4).¹⁷

Statelessness can also be “a by-product of entrenched discrimination and social exclusion,” which is “often closely related to incomplete nation-building” (Manly 2007, 257). Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan observe that democratizing or transitioning regimes often suffer from a “stateness” problem. That is, regimes that are attempting to leave behind a previous authoritarian structure often face a crisis wherein “profound differences about what should actually constitute the polity (or political community) and which demos or demoi (population or populations) should be members of that political community” become problematic (Linz and Stepan 1996, 16). When “profound differences” exist “as to who has the right of citizenship in that state … a ‘stateness’ problem” occurs (16).

The creation of “strangers” and an upsurge in nationalism thus purportedly go hand in hand with democratization processes (Snyder 2000; Geshiere 2009). Many of the groups identified as “strangers” in the nation-building exercise are rendered stateless. For instance, with the exception of Lithuania, the Baltic states excluded ethnic Russians from their understanding of the demos; the Bengalis excluded the Biharis; the Myanmarese omitted the Rohingya; the Bhutanese targeted the Lhotshampa; the Congolese excluded the Banyamulenge; and the Kuwaitis rejected the Bidoon.

This exclusion is often made formal through restrictive or discriminatory citizenship laws. Claude Cahn and Sebihana Skenderovska (2008) observe how many post-Communist states created laws to restrict citizenship, and the concomitant privileges of voting and running for office, to a particular “national” group. Consequently, Serbs and Roma have been excluded from citizenship in Croatia and ethnic Albanians and Roma have been disenfranchised in Macedonia.¹⁸ Brad Blitz (2006) discusses the “erasure” of Slovenes shortly after post-Communist independence and Igor Stiks similarly observes how citizenship laws were manipulated in Slovenia “to eliminate a certain number of citizens from the political, social and economic life of the new state” (2006, 492).

Outside of these cases, which clearly violate the UDHR’s Article 15 prohibition on the arbitrary deprivation of nationality, states retain the right to denationalize individuals on other grounds.¹⁹ For example, a person may be denationalized for converting to another religion, for failing to renew his or her passport, or for not adapting to a state’s “customs.” As in the early twentieth century, denationalization may occur for residing abroad without permission, committing a crime, or engaging in an act deemed “threatening” or “disloyal” to the state. A person may also be stripped of citizenship if he or she acquires citizenship or seeks asylum in another state. Moreover, denationalization on these and other grounds is not peculiar to democratizing regimes or illiberal states. Developed democracies can and do strip individuals, particularly naturalized persons, of their citizenship.

Whether it is through laws that allow for the denaturalization of those deemed (or suspected) terrorists, those who have committed acts against national security,²⁰ or the revocation of citizenship from those born on the territory “without warning or judicial approval” (Ross and Galey 2014 n. pag.), developed world democracies also engage in practices that force those they consider unworthy of citizenship into liminality or deprive them of membership without consent. In the UK, for instance, people can be stripped of citizenship on these grounds without ensuring they are nationals of another country in practice, rendering them stateless (Bennhold 2014a, b).

In 2014, Canada adopted Bill C-24 (Parliament of Canada 2014), which amends the Canadian Citizenship Act such that dual citizens, or those who have “the possibility of dual citizenship” may be denationalized “for a criminal conviction in another country, even if the other country is undemocratic or lacks the rule of law” (Georgia Straight 2014). According to the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers (CARL), “Bill C-24 eliminates any type of hearing in most revocation cases, and replaces it with an administrative procedure that gives citizens in revocation proceedings less protection than permanent residents who are found inadmissible on grounds of misrepresentation” (2014, 7; italics added). CARL adds that “The result of this law is to remove citizenship and render the person a foreign national” (8; italics added). It is then up to the person concerned to prove she or he is not a citizen of another country in order to avoid statelessness (8).

In 2015, the Australian Parliament passed a similar act to Canada’s Bill C-24. The Australian Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Act (No. 166) declares that a dual national who “acts inconsistently with their allegiance to Australia by engaging in conduct” related to terrorism or foreign recruitment effectively “renounces” her or his Australian citizenship (Parliament of Australia 2015, Section 33AA, para. 1). This provision not only applies to naturalized Australians, but also to those dual nationals who became Australian citizens at birth (para. 8).

According to the act, the minister in charge of denationalization or denaturalization of the Australian dual national does not have to give notification of said person’s citizenship deprivation if the minister “is satisfied that giving the notice could prejudice the security, defence or international relations of Australia, or Australian law enforcement operations” (para. 12). Furthermore, it is at the minister’s discretion or “determination” to decide whether to exempt a person under the act’s effects (para. 14) through consideration of “the person’s connection to the other country of which the person is a national or citizen and the availability of the rights of citizenship of that country to the person” (para. 17f). A person could, therefore, be potentially rendered stateless should the minister choose not to exercise his or her power under paragraph 14.²¹

While not a case of denaturalization or citizenship deprivation, the state of Texas in the United States has recently been the site of a practice that is almost tantamount to citizenship denial. For several years the Texas Department of State Health Services refused to provide birth certificates to children who were born to undocumented parents in its territory. This affected hundreds of children, primarily of Mexican descent or whose parents were from Central America (Hennessy-Fiske 2016). The result was the creation of Americans “without the papers to prove it” (Blitzer 2015 n. pag.) with repercussions that ran the gamut of being unable to re-enter the United States and problems enrolling children in school and receiving healthcare (2015 n. pag.; and Hennessy-Fiske 2015).²²

The affected families sued Texas in federal court and reached a settlement with the Texas Department of State Health Services wherein the latter agreed to accept an expanded list of documents as proof of the immigrant parent’s identity (for example, foreign voter cards, U.S. utility bills and residential leases, or library cards). Juanita Valdez-Cox, executive director of La Unión del Pueblo Entero in Texas, called the settlement “a critical victory for immigrant families, but it is also a victory for the constitutional rights of all of us.… Questioning the citizenship of U.S.-born, citizen children of immigrant parents erodes our constitutional freedoms and protections, causes instability for parents and children, and undermines the guarantee that all of our children will unquestionably be citizens” (cited in Hennessy-Fiske 2016 n. pag.).

These are but a few examples that illustrate the tenuous nature of formal belonging in developed democracies, even for those who are so-called “birthright” citizens (that is, they acquired citizenship at birth through the authorized channels). What makes the cases of denationalization and denaturalization especially troublesome in the Canadian and Australian examples—as opposed to the blatant document denial in the Texas case—is the surreptitious way in which the process may be carried out while the citizens concerned are overseas (thereby preventing their reentry and greatly hindering their ability to pursue legal recourse).

While states have come a long way in reducing gender bias in laws related to property and nationality rights compared to one hundred years ago, statelessness still results from outright gender discrimination. For instance, twenty-seven states prevent their female citizens from passing on their citizenship to their children the same way their male counterparts do: The Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Brunei, Burundi, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kiribati, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mauritania, Nepal, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Togo, United Arab Emirates (Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights 2016).²³

In many of these countries, a citizen woman who gives birth to her child while overseas cannot automatically pass on her citizenship to her child. This is not a problem if the father is a citizen of a state that allows for the jus sanguinis transmission of nationality or if the child is born in a country that grants citizenship through jus soli. If neither of these conditions holds, however, or if the father is stateless, the child can be rendered stateless. Many examples exist of children becoming stateless due to conflicts in nationality laws because there is no overarching framework at the international level for regulating citizenship acquisition. It also bears pointing out that developed democracies are not immune to creating stateless persons via gender discrimination either.²⁴

Thus, although “reliance upon the accident of birth is inscribed in the laws of all modern states and applied everywhere” (Shachar 2009, 4) through jus soli and jus sanguinis citizenship transmission, states differ in how they qualify the acquisition of this status. For instance, some states, such as the Dominican Republic, grant citizenship via jus soli as long as one of the parents is a citizen or a legal resident, while other states do not have such a stipulation. In other cases, citizenship through jus sanguinis is limited in application through the first generation born overseas if the parents are no longer residents of their state of citizenship. Other states have different conditions depending on whether a child is born to a mother who is married or is born out of wedlock.

Female citizens are also at risk of denationalization in some states because of the prevailing marriage and divorce laws of their state of origin or state of residence. That is, some states stipulate that a woman will lose her birth citizenship and acquire the citizenship of her foreign husband upon marriage. If the marriage dissolves, the woman may be rendered stateless if the state of her former husband’s citizenship no longer recognizes her as a national or if her state of original citizenship does not reinstate the citizenship she held at birth. These and many other cases of conflicts, or protection gaps, in nationality laws force people into liminality, or statelessness.²⁵

Even when laws are nondiscriminatory in principle, they may be arbitrarily applied in practice. As I demonstrate in Chapters 3 and 4, people may become stateless when civil servants, or those individuals authorized to act on behalf of the state regarding the provision or renewal of citizenship and identity documents, fail to provide such documents, intentionally or not. As Bronwen Manby, discussing the case of statelessness in Africa, explains, civil servants have been known to deny birth certificates on discriminatory grounds or to delay the granting of a passport to a legitimate, but “non-native” citizen.

In practice, individual Africans far more often face the practical impossibility of obtaining official documentation than an explicit denial of nationality. Yet something as simple as a failure to register a birth or an indefinite delay in obtaining a national identification card … can have consequences just as damaging and permanent as if denationalization had been enacted in the law. (2009, 115)

Such problems are not confined to Africa. In various places around the world, minority citizens face obstacles in obtaining or retaining their identity documents. As Chapter 4 explains, the Dominican Republic has generated much attention in recent years because civil registry officers have denied birth certificates, and consequently proof of citizenship, to children born of Haitians in the country who, according to the law prevalent at the time, should have been recognized as Dominican nationals (Wooding 2008, 370; Goris 2011).

While possession of a birth certificate or other forms of state-issued identity documentation does not necessarily mean that a person falls under the operation of a state’s law as a citizen,²⁶ such documents are still the primary means by which a person who is struggling to establish or retain citizenship is able to make a claim to this formal status. This is one of the reasons why trafficked persons, as well as undocumented or irregular migrants, are susceptible to statelessness (van Waas 2008, 165–87). Children whose births go unregistered often find themselves in the same predicament.

Despite the fact that the majority of states around the world have signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child ([CRC] UN 1989), which explicitly asserts in Article 7 that “The child shall be registered immediately after birth,” the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that the births of approximately 290 million children are unregistered globally (UNICEF 2014a). Unable to prove to whom (citizenship acquisition via jus sanguinis) or where one was born (citizenship acquisition via jus soli) places a child at risk of not having their right to a nationality fulfilled—a clear violation of Article 7 of the CRC. The problem is of such magnitude that UNICEF considers birth registration one of its key child protection issues:

Apart from being the first legal acknowledgement of a child’s existence, birth registration is central to ensuring that children are counted and have access to basic services such as health, social security and education. Knowing the age of a child is central to protecting them from child labour, being arrested and treated as adults in the justice system, forcible conscription in armed forces, child marriage, trafficking and sexual exploitation.… In effect, birth registration is their “passport to protection.” (UNICEF 2014a n. pag.)

Lack of birth registration occurs for various reasons. Some states simply do not have the resources to establish civil registries in remote locations, while others have endured serious political or environmental events that destroy existing registries. In still other cases, parents fail to register the birth of their child in the appropriate institution or do not have the means to pay for the transportation or administrative costs to obtain a certificate. Most of the cases of unregistered births occur in South Asia and Eastern and Southern Africa where an estimated 61 and 62 percent of children under five years old are unregistered, respectively (UNICEF 2013, 43).²⁷

Beside issues surrounding conflicts in nationality laws, inadequate application of existing nationality laws by state bureaucrats, outright discriminatory policies, and problems obtaining birth registration and documentation, statelessness can also result from state dissolution. Just as in the early twentieth century, when the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Tsarist polities disintegrated, the former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, USSR, and Sudan are all states that have either dissolved or have had a portion of their state secede and create a new state over the past few decades. In several of the European successor states, certain minority peoples were denied their right to a nationality and remain stateless today.

UNHCR, for example, has official figures on stateless people in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Republic of Moldova, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Ukraine. These populations range from as few as 206 known stateless persons in Armenia to 262,802 in Latvia (UNHCR 2015b). Controversies over citizenship have similarly come to the fore between Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan and consequently placed thousands at risk of statelessness (Reynolds 2012; Sanderson 2014).²⁸

Human Rights Repercussions

As the previous section illustrates, statelessness may result for many different reasons and is not a condition that affects a particular age group or just one region of the world. A person can be born into statelessness or become stateless later in life, and statelessness is not a problem particular to authoritarian or transitioning regimes. Democracies also create and harbor stateless populations. Despite the wide range of people affected and the diverse ways of becoming stateless, stateless people are everywhere excludable because they belong nowhere. Without citizenship, a stateless person may have to deal with the refusal of identity documents and licenses,²⁹ forced labor³⁰ and enslavement,³¹ the denial of private sector employment,³² inadequate housing and healthcare,³³ as well as the violation of other economic and social rights like social security and education.³⁴ Stateless persons are also susceptible to family separation,³⁵ torture,³⁶ trafficking,³⁷ and indefinite or unnecessary detention,³⁸ while being denied adequate access to judicial procedures.³⁹

Due to the obstacles that stateless people face in accessing various human rights, stateless populations often face higher degrees of chronic illness and unemployment, both of which can affect community development. For example, the poor conditions in which many stateless people live either generate or exacerbate health-related problems. The camps and settlements where stateless people live often lack adequate sanitation facilities and running water. Maureen Lynch describes the situation of the Biharis of Bangladesh:

Lack of water and co-habitation with animals, combined with poor drainage and sanitation systems, contribute to a variety of medical problems, including skin disease, water-borne illness, upper respiratory infections and gastro-intestinal disorders. In one camp, only two working wells supply water to 650 families. In Mirpur’s Millat Camp, there was only one latrine for 6,000 people. Few medical clinics exist, and several camps have no health care at all, leaving entire families susceptible to both medical and related financial hardship. (2005, 15)⁴⁰

The stateless are also susceptible to other health problems that can run the gamut of chronic illness, sexually transmitted diseases, and drug abuse to psychological issues such as depression, which sometimes results in “alcoholism, domestic violence and suicide” (Sokoloff 2005, 22). Stateless people are often prohibited from receiving government subsidized healthcare and insurance or in other instances do not receive complete coverage akin to their citizen counterparts,⁴¹ which results in higher percentages of stateless people suffering from treatable health conditions, such as tuberculosis, high blood pressure, and diabetes.⁴² Vulnerability to trafficking,⁴³ as well as lack of education and access to health care services, also results in what may be “epidemic” proportions of HIV/AIDS among some stateless groups (Ehna 2004, 5).⁴⁴ The problem is often compounded when the stateless are directly or indirectly denied access to antiretroviral drugs.⁴⁵

Children are especially susceptible to HIV exposure from their stateless mothers who cannot always access government-provided HIV/AIDS services or prenatal care generally. Additionally, stateless children may also suffer from malnutrition and treatable illnesses. Lynch notes, for instance, that “Children without birth certificates cannot be legally vaccinated in at least twenty countries and over thirty countries require documentation to treat a child at a health facility” (2008, 12). Such limitations on these children’s ability to access health care can have far-reaching consequences: from the inability to obtain medicines for curing preventable or treatable illnesses to higher rates of malnutrition and even death.⁴⁶

Beside health-related issues, the stateless often lack access to favorable labor conditions. Studies illustrate that the stateless are regularly channeled into “3-D jobs”—those that are dirty, dangerous, or degrading. Constantin Sokoloff explains, for example, how the Rohingya are forcibly employed by the Myanmarese army, without pay, “for construction and maintenance of [the army’s] facilities, as well as for a variety of other tasks required by the authorities” (2005, 21).⁴⁷ The denial of opportunities to own land or property and the inability to access credit or obtain business licenses also affects their ability to work.⁴⁸ As Laura van Waas notes in the case of Syria, “stateless Kurds cannot obtain property deeds, register cars or businesses, open a bank account or obtain a commercial driver’s license and in Bahrain, Bidoon have been prohibited from buying land, starting a business or obtaining a government loan” (2010, 25). Moreover, many states forbid noncitizens from holding certain public sector jobs such as that of teachers or medical professionals. These are just some of the possible problems that a stateless person may face within their state of birth or residence.⁴⁹

Since international law deems citizenship the formal vehicle by which states extend protection to their populations when they are outside their own state’s territorial confines, the stateless also lack such protection. Moreover, although Article 13 of the UDHR affirms that everyone has the right to leave any country and return to his or her own country, the stateless often face great hardship when trying to reenter the state that they consider to be their “own” country because the latter does not recognize them as citizens under the operation of its law.⁵⁰ Movement, both within a state and across borders, can therefore be highly problematic, resulting in one of the ironies of statelessness—those who lack a formal membership bond to any state through citizenship are among those with the most severely restricted mobility on earth.

This section has illustrated that stateless people, in general, are bound in numerous ways. Although the stateless are not forced to flee their homes in the same way that other kinds of forced migrants are, they suffer many of the same effects of forced displacement. They are, in Lubkemann’s words (2008), immobilized as their ability to carry out “key life projects” has been involuntarily—and severely—disrupted. Thus, while the issue of statelessness may not be at the forefront of humanitarian agendas or among the stories of the forcibly displaced that have come to our attention in recent years, it is clear that the stateless do suffer.

Macrolevel Repercussions

When one considers the domestic and international constraints faced by those without citizenship, it becomes apparent why international jurists, such as Hersch Lauterpacht, would consider citizenship to be an “instrument for securing the rights of the individual in the national and international spheres” (quoted in van Panhuys 1959, 236), and why citizenship is often considered “not one right but a bundle of rights” (Odinkalu 2008, 14). The violation of the human right to a nationality does not simply have individual-level repercussions, however. Its effects can also be felt community-wide.

For example, statelessness can affect regime stability in various ways. Earlier it was noted that democratization processes may sometimes have negative effects for certain minority populations when they are denationalized or denied citizenship for political gain. The flip side to this phenomenon is the inability of a state to consolidate a democracy. As Linz and Stepan assert, “The greater the percentage of people in a given state who were born there or who had not arrived perceiving themselves as foreign citizens, who are denied citizenship in the state and whose life changes are hurt by such denial, the more unlikely it is that this state will consolidate a democracy” (1996, 33). Virginia Leary likewise adds that “the exclusion of a group of people who reside within a given regime and who have little hope of regularizing their status and becoming citizens can be destabilizing domestically and challenge any regime’s ability to transition fully to a democratic status” (1999, 257).

Some interviewees for this study fear that the legal, political, and social exclusion of Bahamian- and Dominican-born persons of Haitian descent will escalate into a large-scale social problem in the countries of their birth. “We will have pockets of the population that are going to then enter into crisis,” says Francisco Henry Leonardo of the Centro Bonó. “They’re going to enter into a crisis and search for their own identity. Because, look, they feel Dominican, but they are rejected. So, ‘What is our identity?’ They are going to start a process of differentiation.” Altair Rodríguez, a Dominican social scientist, agrees: “It’s a time bomb. We’re creating a bomb. There’s thousands of kids being raised in bateyes without access to education, without access to basic rights.… So we’re creating a social bomb that’s going to explode.”⁵¹

These fears are echoed in the Bahamian case. Bahamian lawyer Dexter Reno Johnson proclaims that the situation “is a keg of dynamite, a source of potential social unrest of mammoth proportions”; “a critical problem that makes most other problems pale into insignificance since unless properly handled, this one could threaten the peaceful existence of the Bahamas, as we know it at any time, and for the foreseeable future” (Johnson 2008, 71, 72).⁵² An anonymous interviewee adds that the Bahamian government’s exclusionary citizenship laws are “creating more liabilities than assets”⁵³ for the country and Mark Desmangles, born of Haitian descent in The Bahamas, observes how statelessness “affects economics. Because this is a group of people who cannot participate economically in the banking system, in the work force to give toward the economic well-being and the betterment of the community.”

Another anonymous Bahamian interviewee, discussing the problems associated with denying citizenship to children born of noncitizens until age eighteen, declares that “What you do in fact do is frustrate and alienate that person for 18 years. How does that serve the public good?”⁵⁴ The Bahamas Constitutional Commission, which made recommendations to alter the Bahamian Constitution in diverse areas, including nationality, also emphatically asserts that it:

cannot overstate the enormous psychological, socio-economic and other ill-effects that result from leaving large groups of persons in limbo in relation to their aspirations for Bahamian citizenship. Not only are the affected individuals badly damaged and marginalized, the entire society is put at risk and its future compromised by having within its borders a substantial body of persons who, although having no knowledge or experience of any other society, are made to feel that they are intruders without any claim, moral or legal, for inclusion. Such feelings of alienation and rejection are bound to translate into anti-social behavior among many members of what is, in effect, a very large underclass in our society. (Government of The Bahamas 2013b, 96–97; italics added)

Additionally, the combination of poor living conditions, limited employment prospects, and social stigma sometimes leads to communal tension in the states where the stateless reside. As UNHCR points out, the “Denial of basic human rights [to stateless persons] impacts not only the individuals concerned but also society as a whole, in particular because excluding an entire sector of the population may create social tension and significantly impair efforts to promote economic and social development” (2010b, 4). During the past few years, for example, significant violence has erupted between Buddhists and stateless Rohingya in Myanmar, with hundreds of people being killed and thousands of homes destroyed.⁵⁵ Banyamulenge, who have struggled for citizenship recognition in the Democratic Republic of Congo, continue to face “discriminatory treatment and ethnic tensions” (UN HRC 2008b, 17), and “excessive force” has been used by the Kuwaiti authorities against Bidoon who have been peacefully protesting for citizenship recognition in that state (Al Jazeera 2012; Reynolds and Cordell 2012, 2).

The problems associated with statelessness are not limited to one state’s borders either. States that refuse to grant citizenship to stateless persons may be providing grounds for these people to “seek full national legal identity elsewhere” (Batchelor 2006, 10). This is problematic because international law does not allow one state to “release itself from the international duty, owed to other states, of receiving back a person denationalized who has acquired no other nationality” (McDougal et al. 1974, 951). That is, states are not permitted to allow stateless people to become “charge[s] on other States” (951). While most stateless groups do not cross borders (they are “noncitizen insiders”), the Rohingya are a prime example of a stateless group that has crossed borders—leaving Myanmar for Bangladesh, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Gulf States—in the hopes of finding a home elsewhere.

The Bidoon of the Gulf region, European Roma, and Banyamulenge are also cases of stateless people who have crossed state borders, whether forcibly or voluntarily. Conflict between states may arise when they do not agree on the origin of stateless people or on which state should be granting citizenship to them, especially when resources are scarce. As Andrew Shacknove remarks, “The potential for international conflict is increased when ambiguity exists about the allocation of, and responsibility for, either territory or populations of forced migrants” (1993, 527).

The issue of deciding who belongs where, and how a given minority population should be treated, can be a particularly politically sensitive regional issue when a state has to deal with stateless persons on its territory who also happen to belong to a recognized minority population in a neighboring state. For instance, the stateless Lhotshampas are allegedly straining Nepal’s resources. Nepal has asked Bhutan, the ethnic “origin” state of the Lhotshampas, to sort out the latter’s nationality status (Khan 2001, 24–25). India, being the regional power, has the clout to negotiate an agreement between Nepal and Bhutan concerning this stateless group, but will not do so because of the huge number of ethnic Nepalis within its own borders. “India is no longer particularly anxious to be associated with Nepali minority rights movements in third countries for fear of its own vulnerability on the matter” (21). Thus, the Lhotshampas end up in a protracted stateless situation. Relatedly, many Roma have found it difficult to obtain citizenship in the states that succeeded the USSR because those states tried to pass them off as residents of a neighboring state at the time of independence.

Surrounding states may also act as staging grounds for stateless persons to engage in activities aimed at overthrowing a particular regime. As Peter Mutharika notes, “Where political enemies have been expelled and denationalized, they may continue to engage in activities aimed at overthrowing the ruling elite” (1989, 17). He adds that neighboring states may “even be drawn into attempts by some stateless persons to subvert the state of origin” (19). Statelessness is thus not only a human rights issue, but a matter of regional security as well.

International Activity Around Statelessness

Since statelessness is a pressing issue from an individual, community, state, and regional perspective, UNHCR and the Inter-Parliamentary Union have encouraged UN member states to accede to the 1954 and 1961 statelessness conventions as a means of “bolster[ing] national solidarity and stability” and “improv[ing] international relations and stability” (UNHCR and IPU 2005, 49). UNHCR has been actively campaigning for statelessness treaty accession since 2011. As Figure 2 illustrates, there has been a sharp increase in the number of states ratifying the two statelessness conventions since the turn of the century.

Former UNSG Ban Ki Moon also engaged in increasing activity on the issue of statelessness, publishing several reports on the arbitrary deprivation of nationality (UN HRC 2009a and b, 2011, 2013b), another report on discrimination against women under nationality law (UN HRC 2013a), as well as a Guidance Note on “The United Nations and Statelessness” (UNSG 2011). The former Secretary General made clear in the latter report that the UN “should tackle both the causes and consequences of statelessness as a key priority within the Organization’s broader efforts to strengthen the rule of law” (3).

Figure 2. Ratifications of statelessness conventions by decade, 1950s–present. UN Treaty Collection 2016.

While the UN considers statelessness a rule of law issue today, when international concern around statelessness first surfaced in the aftermath of WWII it was primarily tied to another group of forcibly displaced persons—refugees. UNHCR, the body created for the protection of refugees in 1950, did not acquire its second mandate over stateless persons until more than twenty years later through General Assembly Resolution 3274 (XXIX) (UN 1974).⁵⁶ Since that time, UNHCR’s mandate on statelessness has expanded through a series of other resolutions (UNHCR 2014a). Prior to the establishment of the agency’s second mandate, however, the UN had already produced the two aforementioned statelessness conventions.

The Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (UN 1954) delineates the rights and duties of stateless persons in their states of residence. It asks signatory states to treat the stateless as well as “aliens generally in the same circumstances” regarding the rights of property, association, gainful employment, housing, and freedom of movement and to treat them as well as nationals regarding artistic and scientific rights, access to the courts, elementary education, public relief, and labor legislation. The Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (UN 1961), which followed a few years later, asks contracting states to offer citizenship to children on their territories who would otherwise be stateless, provide an expedited naturalization procedure to stateless people, avoid denationalizing a person arbitrarily, and to ensure that an individual has access to another nationality before being denationalized, among other stipulations. Although more than a half century has passed since these conventions were issued, and despite the fact that there has been an uptick in the number of ratifications since the early 2000s, the statelessness conventions are among the most poorly ratified human rights treaties of the UN system.⁵⁷ At the time of this writing, and as Figure 3 reflects, of the 193 UN member states, eighty-eight (46 percent) are party to the 1954 convention and sixty-seven (35 percent) are party to the 1961 convention (UN 2016).

Figure 3. States parties as a percentage of UN membership over time, 1954–2016. UN Treaty Collection, 2016.

While fewer than half the UN membership have ratified either of the statelessness conventions as of December 2016, the current UNSG, Antόnio Guterres, believes there has been “a real breakthrough, a quantum leap … in relation to the protection of stateless people” (UNHCR 2011b) over the last few years. For example, a High Level Ministerial Meeting was held in Geneva in 2011 where more than 150 state representatives attended and more than sixty made pledges regarding statelessness: from committing to improve birth registries and acceding to one or both of the statelessness conventions to reducing statelessness on their territory (UNHCR 2012d).

Additionally, in 2010 and 2011 three international expert meetings were held on statelessness. They addressed de jure and de facto statelessness, SSD procedures, and protecting stateless children, respectively. A fourth expert meeting was held in 2013 on interpreting Articles 5 through 9 of the 1961 statelessness convention.⁵⁸ From this series of meetings and other work, UNHCR was able to issue a series of guidelines on statelessness, which culminated in their Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons (2014g). Within this document UNHCR defines a stateless person under the 1954 convention, articulates the rights and status of stateless persons under international law and provides advice on how governments can create statelessness status determination procedures, among other guidelines and clarificatory points. In effect, this Handbook, along with Guideline No. 4 on a child’s right to a nationality (UNCHR 2012c), can be used to assist a wide array of actors in identifying, and addressing the needs of, the stateless.

Moreover, whereas UNHCR previously admitted that it was “not doing enough” to address statelessness (UNHCR 2007), the organization “has more than tripled its expenditure on statelessness—from USD 12 million to USD 36 million in 2013” (UNHCR 2014e, 6) and “The number of UNHCR operations planning statelessness activities more than doubled between 2009 and 2011, from 28 to 60” (UNHCR 2012a, 45). The activities carried out by UNHCR teams center upon the agency’s four areas of responsibility, including the identification and protection of stateless persons and the prevention and reduction of statelessness. As such, UNHCR has provided technical assistance to states, such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, so that their nationality laws can be modified to prevent and reduce statelessness. It has carried out campaigns, conducted workshops and education programs, and provided mobile birth registration units as well (Manly and Persaud 2009).

UNHCR’s most ambitious campaign to date, however, is the aforementioned #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 2024. Launched in 2014 in partnership with United Colours of Benetton (UCB),⁵⁹ the Campaign’s central message is that every person on the planet has the right to belong through citizenship. In order to achieve its articulated goal of ending statelessness by 2024, UNHCR published the Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 2014–2024 (GAP) (UNHCR 2014e).

The GAP contains ten Actions—and fifteen associated goals—that fall within UNHCR’s mandate to resolve and prevent statelessness (Actions 1–5, 7, 9) and to identify and protect stateless persons (Actions 6, 8, 9, 10). These include activities that require political will—such as state ratification of the two statelessness conventions and their grant of protection status to stateless migrants. Other actions demand economic and personnel resources—such as better data collection of stateless populations and the ability of governments to issue ID documents to all those who should hold them. Still other actions demand that governments operate in a transparent and nondiscriminatory manner, especially in the grant, denial, or deprivation of citizenship.⁶⁰ Although I elsewhere critically evaluate the transformative potential of the #IBelong Campaign, and its ability to end statelessness via the GAP by 2024 (Belton 2016), it is important to note here that the Campaign is an ambitious project the likes of which has not been seen since the international community first came together to create the statelessness conventions in the aftermath of World War II.

Beside UNHCR’s latest activities, the Human Rights Council, which has long been silent on the issue of statelessness, has passed multiple resolutions on the right to a nationality in recent years (UN HRC 2008a, 2009c, 2010, 2012b, 2014). These resolutions encourage states to become parties to the statelessness conventions and to amend their national legislation with an eye to addressing statelessness. They also ask for cooperation among UN bodies on statelessness data collection, among other activities. The HRC also passed another resolution on birth registration (UN HRC 2015) and issued the OHCHR-UNSG report on the arbitrary deprivation of nationality via legislative and administrative means, with a special focus on childhood statelessness (UN HRC 2013b) during its 23rd Session.

The UN’s recent upsurge of interest in statelessness is also reflected regionally.⁶¹ The OAS, of which both The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic are members, held an International Meeting on Refugee Protection, Statelessness and Mixed Migratory Movements in the Americas in Brazil in 2010⁶² and adopted the ensuing Brasilia Declaration on the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons in the Americas (UNHCR 2010a). This declaration, although primarily focused on refugees, resolves:

7. To urge countries in the Americas to consider acceding to the international instruments on statelessness, reviewing their national legislation to prevent and reduce situations of statelessness, and strengthening national mechanisms for comprehensive birth registration.

8. To promote the values of solidarity, respect, tolerance and multiculturalism, underscoring the non-political and humanitarian nature of the protection of refugees, internally displaced persons and stateless persons, and recognizing their rights and obligations as well as their positive contributions to society. (UNHCR 2010a, 3; italics in original)

The regional intergovernmental organization has passed several resolutions on the “Prevention and Reduction of Statelessness and Protection of Stateless Persons in the Americas” as well (OAS 2010, 2011, 2013b, 2014). In these resolutions, the OAS General Assembly, akin to the UN Human Rights Council, encourages member states to ratify the statelessness conventions and to amend domestic legislation to prevent and reduce statelessness. Highlighting the importance of regional education on statelessness, the OAS issued a more comprehensive resolution on statelessness, AG/RES.2826 (XLIV-O/14), in which it calls for continued training of member states representatives on the issue of statelessness. In addition to reiterating its calls to amend domestic legislation in line with international law relating to statelessness, this 2014 resolution also asks states to strengthen their civil registry systems,⁶³ amend nationality laws to prevent and eliminate statelessness, and draft regional guidelines on the protection of stateless people. Interestingly, the OAS declares statelessness “a serious global humanitarian problem” in this resolution as well (OAS 2014, 1).

In keeping with its effort to educate governments on the issue of statelessness, the organization has created spaces for government functionaries and interested stakeholders to come together and discuss ways to move forward in addressing regional statelessness. For example, the OAS recently held a workshop on the “Fundamental Elements for Identification and Protection of Stateless Persons and Prevention and Reduction of Statelessness in the Americas,” which served as “an opportunity for participants to strengthen their awareness on the phenomenon of statelessness, as well as to [sic] the legal tools available to identify and provide protection for stateless persons, and to prevent and reduce statelessness” (OAS 2012, n. pag.).

Heeding resolution AG/RES.2826 (XLIV-O/14)’s call to draft regional guidelines on statelessness, member states of the OAS recently came together in a series of subregional meetings to revisit the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees (OAS 1984) as part of UNHCR’s Cartagena +30 process.⁶⁴ From this series of meetings, the Brazil Declaration and Plan of Action for the Americas (UNHCR 2014c) was issued. Significantly, the Brazil Declaration addresses statelessness more expansively than its regional predecessor declarations, with an entire section devoted to solutions for eradicating and preventing statelessness. While it reiterates calls for member states to accede to the statelessness conventions, it also encourages them to establish SSD procedures, engage in community outreach regarding birth registration, and to restore nationality in cases where it has been arbitrarily removed, among other measures. In solidarity with the #IBelong Campaign, participating states also openly declare that they are committed to eradicating statelessness globally by 2024 (5).

While these are necessary actions to eradicate statelessness in the region (and elsewhere), there are some aspects of Chapter VI on statelessness within the Brazil Plan of Action that perhaps too closely associate statelessness with migratory movement. For example, the introductory paragraph to that Chapter says, “At the end of the next ten years, we hope to be in the position to affirm that the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean succeeded in … protect[ing] stateless persons arriving in their territories” (UNHCR 2014c, 17; italics added). It then later declares that states should “Adopt legal protection frameworks that guarantee the rights of stateless persons, in order to regulate issues such as their migratory status” (17; italics added). Finally, it calls on states to confirm the nationality of those who need it, noting that “cases of people who may require having their nationality confirmed frequently arise in situations of irregular migration or when people live in border areas” (17).

Although statelessness may arise in the context of migration, as I note earlier—and as I explain in Chapters 3 and 4—the majority of stateless persons are noncitizen insiders. They have not migrated from elsewhere. They may be the descendants of migrant parents or grandparents, but they are born and continue to reside in the countries of their birth, even though formally excluded. Associating a migratory trajectory to their predicament without clearly specifying that most stateless people are not migrants thus obfuscates the peculiar type of forced displacement they face and ignores the fact that for many of these persons, they know no other home.

Despite these promising international and regional activities around statelessness, the fulfillment of a human right to a nationality remains elusive globally. Exclusionary state practices of citizenship denial and deprivation continue to make people’s access to rights, freedoms, and protections as precarious as they were during Arendt’s time. In distinction to her time, however, the creation of stateless populations is not necessarily linked to crisis, conflict, or persecution. Thus the humanitarian element of their predicament is far from obvious to many. Furthermore, and in contrast to Arendt’s time, practices of citizenship deprivation and denial are not limited to authoritarian regimes. As I demonstrate in the next two chapters, even allegedly democratic states can act in arbitrary and discriminatory ways to forcibly displace people in situ.