People become stateless for a variety of reasons. Some are forced out of their own country by war but are not accepted as refugees by the state into which they escape. Some people become stranded when borders shift. Some are stateless because their birth was never recorded properly.
Having a Nationality is a Human Right
“Everyone has the right to a nationality.” That’s Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. Six years later, the UN passed the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. It was a pretty gutless document that only 57 countries have taken the trouble to sign.
In 1961, the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness was issued by the UN. This document is a more powerful attempt to reduce statelessness. However, by the end of 2008, only 34 countries, including Canada, had signed it.
Stateless Peoples in the Middle East
The best known group without a nationality is the Palestinians, with probably half of them stateless, according to an estimate by Oxford University’s Abbas Shiblak with the Refugee Studies Centre.
In 1947, the nation of Israel was created as a homeland for Jewish people. Many of the Arabs living there fled into neighbouring countries. In Jordan, they were given passports and citizenship but in other Arab states they received neither. Those people and their descendants are today’s five million stateless Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, there are other stateless groups, such as the Bidoon in the United Arab Emirates. These are people whose forebears settled in the Persian Gulf region several generations ago. They came from other Arab countries, Iran, and India as workers and merchants. There are probably 100,000 of them and they have no identity documents or passports.
Former Soviet Citizens in the Baltic States
Farther north a large number of Russians became stranded when Estonia declared itself independent from the Soviet Union in 1991. Estonia had been invaded and taken over by the Soviet Union in 1940 and many Russians were forced to settle there. When Estonia proclaimed itself free of Soviet occupation it offered the Russians inside its borders three choices. Go back to Russia, learn the Estonian language and pass an exam to become a citizen, or remain stateless. Refugees International says about 160,000 are stuck in the stateless category.
Similarly, many Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians became stranded in Latvia when the Soviet Union collapsed. These people, says the Latvian government, are entitled to a “non-citizen Latvian passport" and there are about 350,000 of them.
Bangladesh Independence Creates Non-Citizens
Half a million Biharis live in 116 refugee camps in Bangladesh. These are people left over from a 1971 war that saw East Pakistan separate from West Pakistan. The Muslim Biharis took the West Pakistan side in the war of separation: a poor choice as it turned out to be the loosing side. After the war ended, a few Biharis were allowed to move to Pakistan but that country soon closed the door. Now, they live statelessly in squalid camps.
Non-Citizens Live in Poor Conditions
There are other groups of stateless people in Burma, Kuwait, the Dominican Republic, Syria, and many other countries. Usually, the conditions under which they live are poor and the prospect of gaining citizenship limited.
Here’s how Refugees International describes their situation: “Stateless status often keeps children from attending school and condemns families to poverty. Because statelessness often originates in past conflicts and disputes over what constitutes national identity, granting citizenship, which can only be done by national authorities, is inherently difficult.”
 |
