Human Rights and Wrongs

Lives on Hold: The Human Cost of Statelessness

The OSCE’s current Human Dimension Implementation Meeting has a huge number of side events. Today I attended one by Refugees International: ‘Lives on Hold: The Human Cost of Statelessness.’

Statelessness is an issue of which I was relatively ignorant. Maureen Lynch gave a fascinating presentation of the work Refugees International have been doing in this area and distributed a copy of the organisation’s recent report on statelessness around the world.

A bit of background: There are many declarations and international agreements underlining the right to a nationality (the UN Declaration of Human Rights for one, as well as several less well-known agreements). However, despite these international commitments there are many countries with staggering numbers of people who don’t have that right.

Being without nationality means being without security. Without this right, people start losing other rights, employment rights, healthcare rights, social security rights. But how do people find themselves in such positions? Maureen Lynch outlined some of the main reasons: Political change; targeted discrimination; differences in the laws between countries; transfer of territory; law relating to marriage and birth registration; expulsion of people from a territory; nationality based solely on descent; renunciation of nationality without acquisition of another; lack of financial ability to register children.

Examples were given from an assessment mission that was undertaken last November:

• In Bangladesh 250,000 Biharis live in crowded camps near the Pakistani border. Pakistan and Bangladesh both refuse to offer them citizenship and nothing has been done for 34 years to change their fate.
• In the United Arab Emirates 100,000 Bidoon live in shantytowns and are subjected to widespread discrimination which affects their rights to education, employment and healthcare.
• In Estonia 150,000 Russian-speaking minority residents are not allowed citizenship without developing Estonian language skills to pass a citizenship test. There have however been signs that the government is willing to make concessions in some cases and steps are being made in the right direction.

It’s a vast problem. The low conservative estimate by Refugees International suggests over 11 million people are stateless. The problem is such that it is not restricted to one area of the world, and responsibility lies with individual governments, as well as the international community and United Nations to address the issue and find long-term solutions.

Refugees International has helped to bring the issue of statelessness onto the political agenda in the USA as well as in Europe. Positions have been created to focus on this issue, and high level discussions have been held. There is a full list of recommendations to governments, UN and NGOs in the report which can be downloaded from the Refugees International website.

posted by Becca @ 3:18 pm