Suchergebnisse

AbstractHaving recently emerged from its unenviable status as the runt of international law, the phenomenon of statelessness nonetheless eludes traditional international legal instruments. Confronted with questions of nationality that typically fall within the domain of sovereignty, international and regional human rights bodies struggle to rein in the increasingly creative measures that states adopt to obscure the production and persistence of statelessness. This Article uncovers and dissects the different ways in which states manufacture statelessness not through explicitly discriminatory laws and unequal treatment, but through manipulating ostensibly neutral criteria for nationality. The Article identifies three such criteria that are not traditionally considered "suspect" categories for the grant or denial of nationality: time, territory, and administrative practice. It also suggests doctrinal, policy, and strategic tools for identifying and responding to the types of statelessness that are not a collateral consequence of state failure or incompetence, but the outcome of state intentionality.

Statelessness -- the non-acquisition of citizenship -- can blight a child's prospects throughout life. Adapted from the source document.

Statelessness is a global phenomenon which is also present in the European Union. At the end of 2018, UNHCR estimated the total number of stateless persons in the European Union plus Norway at 399 283 individuals. This includes both stateless individuals and persons of undetermined nationality. UNHCR and UNICEF also estimate that, in 2017, there were 2 100 children registered stateless in Europe, a fourfold increase since 2010. Article 1 of the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons defines a stateless person as 'a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law'. Statelessness is a legal anomaly, which can prevent those concerned from accessing fundamental human, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. As a result, such persons often live in conditions of protracted marginalisation and discrimination, facing numerous difficulties, such as the inability to receive medical assistance, enrol in educational programmes, acquire property, obtain legal employment, marry or open a bank account. Even though statelessness can occur in various contexts, its most common causes include state succession, ill-defined or discriminatory nationality laws, and arbitrary deprivation of nationality. Statelessness can also be a consequence of forced displacement and forced migration and can result when people face difficulties accessing civil registration documents, including birth certificates, necessary to acquire or confirm nationality.

Statelessness in the Caribbean demonstrates how people can be forcibly displaced under nonconflict conditions without having fled a home, and how democracies force people into statelessness--the condition of not being a citizen anywhere--through the cover of bureaucratic procedures, neutral laws, and sovereign claims to determine membership

Transcript of 30 th April, 2021 Speech at American Graduate School in Paris, Annual Student Conference: Statelessness in International Relations: Causes, Consequences, and Covid-19 Virtual Event