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IN THE STATE OF BEING STATELESS

Written by Het Shah

2nd Year, BA International Relations Student, University of Groningen, Netherlands

INTRODUCTION
Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to a
nationality”i and “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to
change his nationality”ii. That means as per article 1 of the convention relating to the stateless
person, ‘“stateless person ’’means a person who is not considered as a national by any State
under the operation of its law.” Additionally, Individuals can become stateless either by law
(de jure) or by circumstance (de facto).iii Therefore, the problem of statelessness or the problem
of living with no legal background or citizenship is critical today. Millions of people worldwide
are in search of basic necessities, including their right to life which they are deprived of due to
insufficient legal background.iv When it comes to human rights, being human is the sole
requirement in order to obtain human rights irrespective of nationality, language, race, gender
and the notion that all human beings have rights by virtue of their common humanity should
be a recent development.v Therefore, this paper demonstrates how international protection is
still a problem for the rights of stateless individuals.

WHY IS STATELESSNESS A PROBLEM?

For us, citizenship or nationality only matters when we travel abroad, or when we vote in
national elections, or Olympic tournament is on. Citizenship on a daily basis does not matter
us, but it is an obstacle to millions of people out there because citizens enjoy the right of
national protection, right of healthcare, education, employment and equality before the law,
people without citizenship—those who are “stateless”—are some of the most vulnerable in the
world.vi

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Regardless of whether a nation consents to think about a stateless individual for citizenship,
decisions are frequently affected by the state’s verifiable, political and philosophical cosmetics.
At times families who have lived in a specific nation for ages are rejected citizenship in light
of their ethnicity, religion, race or even social and etymological foundations. At the point when
governments change or are toppled, individuals can be retroactively deprived of citizenship
and property, kept lastly ousted.vii

Above that, it keeps individuals from moving and builds their odds of self-assertive capture or
confinement with no sufficient cures. To put it plainly, it underestimates and makes individuals
feel useless with no prospect of their circumstance regularly improving, no expectation for a
superior future for themselves or their children. Adding on to this, International Law is
considered as law among States, and people are, all in all, objects and not subjects of
International Law. Since nationality is depicted as the connection between the individual and
the Law of Nations, stateless people are not qualified for the advantages of the Law of Nations.
Therefore, as a result, the situation of stateless people is so shaky that stateless people have
been somewhat suitably called “outlaws.”viii

THE RELUCTANCE OF CONFERRING CITIZENSHIP

Roxanne Lynn Doty says, “When it comes to unauthorised movements of people, this view
presumes that it is natural for the world to be disturbed by people who move across sovereign
borders without authorisation because some people belong in some places and other people
belong in other places.”ix The acceptance of stateless individuals also mongers fear over the
citizen and the government officials over the issue of providing, education, healthcare,
adequate living conditions where they themselves lack those resources. Sometimes stateless
are also possessed as a threat to national security and integrity. Likewise, the number of
sovereign states lacks a consistent legal framework for recognising stateless persons and
addressing their specific political and economic needs.

Another international policy issue becomes especially prominent when developed countries are
faced with prospects of a mass exodus from conflicts in nearby countries. Most Western
countries do not subscribe to the expanded “refugee” definition of the OAU Convention or

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Cartagena Declaration. They are hesitant to perceive as exiles those in a mass departure from
the summed-up struggle. Be that as it may, philanthropic contemplations, alongside elements,
for example, local political weights to react, a feeling of shared duty regarding the contentions
being referred to, the craving for deliberate populace developments, or the hesitance of
neighbouring nations to get mass floods, can prompt the foundation of one of a few types of
impermanent assurance plans.x One of the largest stateless groups in the world is the Rohingya
of Myanmar. That nation’s laws do not count the mostly Muslim Rohingya among the
ethnicities eligible for citizenship, and the Rohingya are therefore de jure stateless.xi

CONDITION OF ROHINGYA REFUGEES IN MYANMAR

The Rohingya individuals have confronted many years of systematic discrimination,
statelessness and targeted on viciousness in Rakhine State, Myanmar. Such abuse has
constrained Rohingya women, girls, boys and men into Bangladesh for a long time, with
noteworthy spikes following violent assaults in 1978, 1991-1992, and again in 2016. However,
it was August 2017 that activated by a wide margin the biggest and quickest displaced person
inundation into Bangladesh. From that point forward, an expected 745,000 Rohingya—
including more than 400,000 children—have fled into Cox’s Cox’s Bazar. The enormous scale
of the influx is putting immense pressure on the Bangladeshi host community and existing
facilities and services.xii

New spontaneous settlements sprouted overnight, raising concerns over the lack of adequate
shelter, water and sanitation, access to essential services, and general protection considerations
such as safety for women and girls. The Kutupalong refugee settlement has grown to become
the largest of its kind in the world, with more than 600,000 people living in an area of just 13
square kilometres, stretching infrastructure and services to their limits.
The Bangladesh government has responded generously throughout the latest crisis. Local
Bangladeshi villages have also taken in the new arrivals. They spared no effort to help, straining
their already limited resources.xiii

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“They burnt our house and drove us out by shooting. We walked for three days through the
jungle.” Mohammed, who fled to Bangladesh with his family of seven, including a baby born
along the way.

Systemic violence against the Muslim minority group can be traced back to 1978’s Operation:
Dragon King, a campaign to register residents wherein government powers expelled Rohingya,
affirming they disregarded the state’s nationality laws. Despite the recorded accord of the
Rohingya’s appearance in Rakhine State in the fifteenth century, Myanmar does not perceive
the gathering as indigenous. Their statelessness was arranged by the 1982 Burmese Citizenship
Law that recognised three classes of citizenship crosswise over 135 authority ethnic gatherings,
barring the Rohingya from each. Late interests for citizenship change have failed to be
noticed.xiv

While the latest repatriation efforts seem to have slowed down, the apparition of phenomenal
refinement of the Rohingya back to Myanmar is concerning given the essential condition for
enduring repatriation has not been met: a guarantee of citizenship by Myanmar. Cases of ethnic
abuse and consequent mass departures are not new, yet the Rohingya crisis is unique because
of the group’s status as stateless.xv

According to the UNHCR, when stateless persons are unable to return to their countries of
habitual residence after having left them, often in search of asylum or refugee status, the result
is often prolonged detention outside of the country in which they habitually reside. The reason
for such detention is that, without proof of identity or nationality, stateless persons often cannot
re-enter their state of habitual residence. Furthermore, the detaining state cannot resolve the
question of where to deport the stateless detainee, and it to secure adequate legal protection for
the Rohingya is unwilling to let them illegally reside within its territory. In such cases, stateless
persons have been held in prolonged or "indefinite detention" only because the question of
where to send them remains unresolved.xvi

Statelessness, on a basic level, implies that neither Myanmar nor some other state perceives the
Rohingya as natives. Practically, this implies their ‘entitlement to have rights ’’is jeopardised
as stateless people are regularly denied access to medicinal services, education, employment

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opportunities, and political interest. With regards to the Rohingya crisis, this paper argues,
addressing the issue of statelessness is essential and critical. Inability to do so is probably going
to risk the evacuee repatriation process seriously yet, in addition, any prospects for future
dependability in the Rakhine State. While there is rich writing on outcast repatriations, meagre
consideration has been paid to the arrival of stateless evacuees. Accommodating statelessness
and repatriation is naturally troublesome as the privilege to come back to one’s nation generally
relies upon that individual's designation as a citizen.

Therefore, considering what Giorgio Shani mentioned, these violations are subject to
prosecution by the International Criminal Court and various international tribunals convened
to investigate crimes against humanity because this is an act of ethnic cleansing as per UNSC
resolution S/1994/678 also With regard to Article 7(5), the United Nations Conference on the
Elimination or Reduction of Future Statelessness, in Resolution III of its Final Act,
recommended that States which condition the retention of nationality by their nationals abroad
on a declaration or registration should take “all possible steps to ensure that such persons are
informed in time of the formalities and time limits to be observed if they are to retain their
nationality”.xvii

CONCLUSION
One approach to guarantee that stateless people understand their entitlement to nationality as
articulated in Article 15 of the Universal Declaration, is through the doctrine of the genuine
and valid link. As indicated by this convention, an individual ought to be qualified to get
citizenship from states with which she or he has a significant association or a genuine and
effective link. At the very least, an individual ought to be qualified for the citizenship of the
nation with which she or he has the closest link or association. A generous connection or
association with a state can be forged by, for instance, long haul residence in a state without a
progressively significant connect to another state, plummet from a state's native, birth inside a
state's domain, or citizenship in a nation's previous government state.xviii

It is of interest to point out that a stateless person can also be a refugee if in addition to not
being considered as a nationality by any state they also meet the definition of article 1 of the

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1951 Refugee Convention (i.e. have fled their country due to a fear of persecution). Generally
speaking, stateless refugees are identified and treated as refugees - e.g. in UNHCR’s statistics
on statelessness, only non-refugee stateless populations are counted.xix

Therefore, to conclude with, this paper objects the deprivation of rights to stateless individuals
but also believes in a practical matter that in any case, a sovereign state has the privilege to
figure out who gets its citizenship. This right, nonetheless, ought to be compatible with relevant
international standards laws. At least, these measures restrict states from rendering their
residents stateless, oblige states to regard the human rights of stateless people, and commit
states to grant citizenship to all children born within state borders.

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