“Everyone has the right to a nationality” proclaims Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Subsequent human rights treaties have elaborated on non-discrimination in relation to nationality, and placed an obligation on states both to protect stateless persons and to reduce statelessness. International human rights law requires states to respect the right of every person to a nationality, in particular, where they would otherwise be stateless. This obligation is strongest for children. But most states jealously hold on to a position that, except in very limited circumstances, decisions on nationality are firmly a matter of state discretion. Human rights organisations have often passively conceded this point, not focusing much on the right to a nationality except in the most egregious cases of denationalisation, where many other forms of discrimination and arbitrary decision-making are also present.
Yet statelessness is a serious human rights problem. It is the basis on which further rights violations are carried out, and is a driver of inequality and a barrier to accessing justice. It is often the result of discrimination: against women, against children born out of wedlock, against ethnic or religious minorities, even against the disabled.
There is now a growing recognition that the right to a nationality is central to the realisation of other human rights, and that those who lack an effective nationality are amongst the most marginalised in any society. This is demonstrated by the much greater focus on statelessness over the past decade from UNHCR, the UN agency with responsibility for the issue since the 1950s, leading to the launch in late 2014 of a campaign to end statelessness globally within ten years. UNHCR’s official estimate is that at least ten million people are stateless in the world – but this is generally seen as a very significant underestimate.
At the same time, the development community is showing a much greater interest in questions of identification as critical to the measurement of other targets and to the targeting of initiatives to reach the most vulnerable. The Sustainable Development Goals adopted in September 2015 include as target 16.9 “provide legal identity for all, including birth registration”, by 2030. While everyone knows what birth registration is, there is immense lack of clarity about the meaning of legal identity, and the extent to which it is or is not coterminous with civil registration or with recognition of nationality. National security concerns in an age of terrorism are also creating pressure on governments to document their populations more effectively. The increased prevalence of biometric identification requirements creates privacy concerns for all. Some scholars, meanwhile, challenge the recognition of nationality or legal identity as ends in themselves, and focus instead on the self-creation of spaces for citizenship participation even by and among the undocumented.
The Centre for the Study of Human Rights plans a series of meetings to explore these questions. The first meeting will set the scene, as Bronwen Manby, visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, and Amal de Chickera, co-founder of the newly established Institute for Statelessness and Inclusion, debate the current state of international law on these issues and the nature of the populations most affected by statelessness. The discussion will be facilitated by Stefanie Grant, also a visiting fellow at the Centre, whose current work is on forced and involuntary migration and identification of those who die or go missing in transit.
The first meeting will also seek to identify the wider challenges created by or contributing to statelessness, setting out an agenda for a series of further meetings and identifying potential speakers from within the LSE community and elsewhere. Among the themes that could be addressed (depending on interest from potential speakers) are:
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the overlaps and differences between the human rights agenda on statelessness and the development agenda on legal identity;
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the impact of statelessness on development and social welfare indicators: obstacles to education, health care and employment, property rights, registration of a business, accessing a bank account or credit;
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the right to a nationality for children: statelessness resulting from discrimination based on gender, ethnicity or birth out of wedlock; lack of rights based on location of birth; ineffective or arbitrary birth registration systems;
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nationality and the democratic process: non-nationals usually have no right to vote, stand for election or effect change through regular political channels, and deprivation or denial of nationality is thus used as a means of silencing political opponents;
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the relationship between nationality discrimination, statelessness and conflict;
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the nexus between statelessness and refugees: statelessness as a cause or consequence of flight or an intensifier of vulnerability in exile;
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the protection of stateless persons in migration and in immigration proceedings;
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the implications of the increased trend to deprivation of nationality in the context of counter-terrorism measures;
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the potential role of new biometric technologies in reducing – or increasing – statelessness and exclusion from society more broadly;
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the risks to privacy and data security in the context of national identification systems;
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the impact of formal lack of nationality on citizenship rights in the broader sense –participation in the political and social life of the community where a person lives.
The discussions at these meetings will inform ongoing discussions in which Bronwen and Stefanie are involved on the international, regional and national level responses to statelessness and the right to a nationality. For more information on some of these debates, see
http://www.refworld.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/rwmain?page=statelessness
http://www.institutesi.org/world/issues.php
http://wiser.wits.ac.za/hague-colloquium-papers
Please be in touch with Bronwen (b.manby@lse.ac.uk) and/or Stefanie (s.grant2@lse.ac.uk) to express interest or to propose specific topics to explore.