Most people have never heard of statelessness. The idea of a person with no nation is not even considered by most brains.
Nationality seems to be inherent to being a person. Yes, sure, most countries were created for,and because of European elites playing havoc in lands whose political landscapes were already more complex than fourth dimension chess, leading to conflict-filled independence projects. Concurrently with the history of colonization, it is almost impossible to think of a life without nationality.
In a world that values individuality, the concept of nation-estate seems to be one of the few collective endeavors embraced by “modern” life, along with the practice of religion (it really depends on the religion) and the institution of family (it really depends on the family). Now, to that list, one could add being part of a corporation, but that is a theme for a whole other article.
The point is: once you meet a stateless person you realize that having no nationality can make it impossible for one to participate in a corporation, can shake and scare one’s sense of family and maybe even interfere with religion – because it is really hard to have faith when one’s crime is to be born without I.D.
Statelessness is a tale directly related to migration. Displacement, a mixed background, and a lack of opportunity are not accounted for within a system that marginalizes the stateless and causes statelessness. Every time a baby is born their nationality on paper is theoretically defined by one or the other: blood or soil.
Stateless people are born as a result of displacement and dissonances between home and host country. If blood is what defines citizenship, being born in a country is not enough to be a citizen. One needs a parent born in that land, and if there isn’t one, the home country of the parents should grant status. Often, the home country will not do that if the child needs to be born there to be granted citizenship. Under lack of blood or soil, statelessness comes and the ones molded by it get to live with no nationality.
The more one learns about statelessness the more one realizes that there is a lot more to the apparent dichotomy of soil or blood: it depends on which kind. Ethnicity or race discrimination based on formal or informal policies and practices that affect certain groups disproportionately is a common form of screening that leads to statelessness, like the Rohingya in Myanmar1 are stateless due to the restrictive provisions and application of citizenship, which primarily confers citizenship based on race. Additionally, 25 states,2 including Nepal and Swaziland, do not allow women to transfer nationality to their children, making statelessness a reality if the father is unknown, missing or deceased.
In practice, living without identification can result in a myriad conflicts for an individual, and they can easily be isolating. From fear of living without identification to simply not being able to take part in activities that have as their main result mobility and connection: How does one enroll in school? How does one get a driver’s license? In global North countries especially, there is not a week that goes by where a person is not asked to show their identification.
The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) is the international organization that represents and defends stateless people; after all, no country will. In their sixty-five years of existence resolutions were formed, reports delivered, and pressure was made to fight against the use and mis-use of deprivations of nationality. Scattered victories,3 like the 300,000 Urdu-speakers that were finally considered citizens of Bangladesh in 2008, or, the 2007 case of the stateless children born to Brazilian parents abroad who were unable to acquire Brazilian nationality unless they went back to live in Brazil, set a slow but steady pace for the agency.
The #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 20244 was launched along with the United Nations global goals and the only country that met the goal so far was Kyrgyzstan.5 Otherwise, the movement for stateless people resides in the advocacy of members of civil society, who, little by little, help the ingression of stateless people into institutions, like unions and schools.6
Discrimination against stateless people manifests itself most clearly in their attempts to access documentation needed to prove their nationality or their entitlement to nationality, such as a national identity document (I.D.) or a birth certificate. Lack of such documentary proof can result in a vicious circle. If you don’t have those documents, you cannot get citizenship. Without citizenship, it is impossible to get these documents. So one lives, but is denied access to healthcare and education, the right to vote and to relocate, to leave the host country and to explore it.
According to the UNHCR, there are ten million stateless people in the world. One of them (the only one I have met so far) is among the most gracious people I have ever encountered. In a project that unites ethnography and archeology, Isadora Dias Vieira and I had the chance to collaborate with Abraham Paolos – father, M.A in international Relations, friend, advocate for the rights of imprisoned immigrants, and community organizer – in building a mosaic of his story and his statelessness, linking it to the history of nation-states, especially his host country, the United States of America.
Right at the beginning of our interviews, Abraham told us not to pity him and not to build a narrative that incites pity. According to the Cambridge dictionary, pity is “a feeling of sadness or sympathy for someone else’s unhappiness or difficult situation.” When I met Abraham, it always surprised me how he communicated happiness, but I could not help but feel for the many hardships he faced because he did not have an identification. The mental image I got was the anxiety of trying to go through a turnstile and being hit in the stomach by the will to go and the machine’s unacceptance of whatever the person hit in the stomach had to offer. It is the sensation of being trapped by an identification error and the time and effort it takes to get a stamp that, in our society, theoretically should be given a long time before Abraham could utter his first words.
Sympathy is not the only feeling present in hearing his story. The guilt of the things lived, and the things not accomplished went through my head. How could I, who have all the Identification cards, not feel shame for the possibilities and rights not exercised? And how can he, amidst so many tests, be able to stand and go and write and live so much? His embrace of life and pain, his refusal to be a shadow even though in the eyes of at least three nation-states he is one, is a constant reminder of the brilliance of minds tossed to the margins and how much societies around the globe lose for their hiding of statelessness and the people who are so much more than bodies deprived of nationality.
Notes
1https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/rohingya/
3https://www.refworld.org/docid/545b47d64.html
4https://www.refworld.org/docid/545b47d64.html
6The University Council of Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Consu/Unifesp) in Brazil, approved in November 13th, the creation of affirmative actions for and the insertion of refugees, stateless and humanitarian visa applicants in their selection: https://www.unifesp.br/noticias-anteriores/item/4143-unifesp-aprova-vagas-na-graduacao-para-refugiados-apatridas-e-portadores-de-visto-humanitariofbclid=IwAR0JCO3KATQUVqwjTkPFCjla08LN1sVcvoY00GkxU3hcYQhUm8UGOV6QRM
References
“How UNHCR helps the stateless.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“Nationality and Statelessness: Handbook for Parliamentarians N° 22.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. July 2014:30.
“UNHCR Action to Address Statelessness: A Strategy Note.” United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. March 2010.
Unravelling Anomaly. Detention, Discrimination and the Protection Needs of the Stateless Persons. London: Equal Rights Trust, 2010.
UNHCR (15 June 2006) “UNHCR worldwide population overview.” UNHCR. Retrieved 13April 2018.