Often times when we post about immigrant rights on SM I see a conflict develop between those that believe that even certain basic rights should only be granted to, or expected by citizens, and those who believe this policy is too harsh. As one commenter pointed out, the U.S. Constitution does not consider immigration status when dealing with certain freedoms. The reason I bring this up is that governments around the world have been using the “citizenship loophole” to deny large populations of people the right to have rights. The Christian Science Monitor explains by citing the example of Geneva Camp in Dhaka, Bangladesh:
Borders have made all the difference in the life of 25-year-old Noor Islam. He was born in Bangladesh, but an invisible line has virtually confined him to Geneva Camp, a squalid enclave in the capital, Dhaka.
Shifting borders dictated this fate. In 1971, when East Pakistan gained independence as Bangladesh, Islam’s family and some 300,000 other Urdu-speakers found themselves without a nationality in the new Bengali state.“In Geneva Camp, we don’t have much access to education and jobs,” Islam says, adding that citizenship would dramatically transform their lives.
The so-called Stranded Pakistanis are one of the largest and oldest communities of stateless people, a group estimated to number 11 million across the globe. Their predicament deserves more attention, say experts, since national identity is the most fundamental of human rights - indeed, the very right to have rights.
“They are the ultimate forgotten people,” says James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative in New York. The problem persists, he says, in part because nation-states still enjoy broad discretion under international law to grant or deny citizenship as they see fit.
It’s really easy to exploit citizenship status actually. Even our own President uses it to a degree. If you change a person’s status from citizen to something else, say an “enemy combatant,” they no longer have the right to have rights. They become a stateless person. Governments all around the world are getting in on the action to make their “problems” go away (and have been for decades).
Statelessness is the untold dark side of new nations, including those in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. To date, nearly 20 percent of the population in Latvia and Estonia are stateless persons, according to one estimate. Thousands of stateless people languish in poor conditions in some of the most politicized and conflict-ridden areas of the world, including Palestine and Iraq.The reasons for the problem differ from region to region, at times caused by the sweeping succession of states as in the former Soviet Union. The chaos of war often prevents birth registration, a subtle but destructive denial of rights for newborns. In many Middle Eastern states, laws confer citizenship based on patrilineal descent, meaning that those born to women or male non-citizens are denied citizenship of their country of birth.
Despite divergent causes, statelessness exacts a common and extraordinary toll on its victims, depriving them of the basic rights that most citizens take for granted.
…These are powerful lessons to bear in mind in light of nation-building efforts around the world, particularly Iraq. “For Iraq, it’s very clear that Saddam Hussein deprived many people of their nationality - particularly the Kurds,” says Philippe Leclerc, UNHCR’s senior legal officer for statelessness. “What we would like to see in the negotiations on the constitution is to ensure … that it is not possible to deprive a person of his or her nationality on grounds linked to religion or other factors.”
When you have no rights (like the basic right to an education) guess what kind of education you get?
A number of solutions exist for preventing statelessness, including something as simple yet effective as birth registrations. “Much of statelessness is caused because stateless people cannot prove their citizenship by birth,” says Geske.
Most important of all, nation-states cannot rely on the law alone to address the problem, experts say.
“What we’re starting to begin is a more comprehensive response to statelessness,” says Mr. Leclerc, pointing out that humanitarian aid, political support, awareness raising, and links with development agencies are vital ingredients. The approach, he says, helped win citizenship last year for 190,000 people in Sri Lanka, one of the longest cases of stateless in the world.
