humanitarian

Nationality Rights for All

As long as the nation state has been around there have been stateless people. According to the latest report of Refugees International these number around 12 million world-wide, being roughly the same numbers as those categorised as refugees, but without any of the rights or recognition of refugees. While the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 laid the foundation for the nation state and who could live in it, and then ultimately, the rules for travel between them, the question was never answered as to what about those without a state. Now this is not a trivial question about a small number of people living on the edges of society, but there are large numbers often reflecting complex histories and causes.

Just to give a snapshot there are around 3 million stateless people in Ivory Coast making up 20 per cent of the population; there is up to 3 million — mostly Burmese — in Thailand; 2.6 million in Nepal; which when they are all put together these make up the majority. Smaller groups include 300,000 ‘hill’ Tamils in Sir Lanka, 300,000 Koreans in Japan, 650,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic, and 200,000 from Colombia in Ecuador, and large numbers of Palestinians scattered in a number of countries.

While the right to nationality is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many countries do not want to extend the right of a citizen to significant proportion of populations living within their borders. Without rights or access to services including health and education and broad legal protection, they are at the mercy of a range of exploitative relations ranging from lower wages than their citizen counterparts, through to slavery and trafficking, and at times genocide.

This Progress Report and Global Survey on Statelessness is an important report, as it highlights the situation in most countries, and the steps than have been made to sort out the problems in a small number of cases. This report focuses in on Ethiopia where during the war with Eritrea in the late 1990s, it denationalised up to 500,000 people of Eritrean origin, but then quietly reversed this decision in 2003. Bangladesh changed its laws in 2008 following a legal judgement to allow many of the Urdu speakers (originally from Pakistan) who have been stateless to acquire citizenship status, and Kenya also following legal rulings has made moves to recognise the Nubians who originated from Southern Sudan to be recognised as citizens. In all these cases, issues have emerged about having these legal rights actually recognised, but they represent small steps.

The plight of stateless people and the arbitrary manner in which citizenship can be taken from people highlights the issue of the nation state in a more globalised world. The arbitrary denial of citizenship for historical reasons can go back centuries, or be tied to a conflict is a travesty. What is worse though is that modern successful states such as Thailand and Japan still cannot come to recognise the large stateless population they have within their borders and formally recognise the important contributions they make to their economies by giving them the same rights as everybody else.

© 2009 People and Development.