Statelessness in the Caribbean. Kristy A. Belton
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trafficked persons, as well as undocumented or irregular migrants, are susceptible to statelessness (van Waas 2008, 165–87). Children whose births go unregistered often find themselves in the same predicament.
Despite the fact that the majority of states around the world have signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child ([CRC] UN 1989), which explicitly asserts in Article 7 that “The child shall be registered immediately after birth,” the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that the births of approximately 290 million children are unregistered globally (UNICEF 2014a). Unable to prove to whom (citizenship acquisition via jus sanguinis) or where one was born (citizenship acquisition via jus soli) places a child at risk of not having their right to a nationality fulfilled—a clear violation of Article 7 of the CRC. The problem is of such magnitude that UNICEF considers birth registration one of its key child protection issues:
Apart from being the first legal acknowledgement of a child’s existence, birth registration is central to ensuring that children are counted and have access to basic services such as health, social security and education. Knowing the age of a child is central to protecting them from child labour, being arrested and treated as adults in the justice system, forcible conscription in armed forces, child marriage, trafficking and sexual exploitation.… In effect, birth registration is their “passport to protection.” (UNICEF 2014a n. pag.)
Lack of birth registration occurs for various reasons. Some states simply do not have the resources to establish civil registries in remote locations, while others have endured serious political or environmental events that destroy existing registries. In still other cases, parents fail to register the birth of their child in the appropriate institution or do not have the means to pay for the transportation or administrative costs to obtain a certificate. Most of the cases of unregistered births occur in South Asia and Eastern and Southern Africa where an estimated 61 and 62 percent of children under five years old are unregistered, respectively (UNICEF 2013, 43).27
Beside issues surrounding conflicts in nationality laws, inadequate application of existing nationality laws by state bureaucrats, outright discriminatory policies, and problems obtaining birth registration and documentation, statelessness can also result from state dissolution. Just as in the early twentieth century, when the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Tsarist polities disintegrated, the former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, USSR, and Sudan are all states that have either dissolved or have had a portion of their state secede and create a new state over the past few decades. In several of the European successor states, certain minority peoples were denied their right to a nationality and remain stateless today.
UNHCR, for example, has official figures on stateless people in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Republic of Moldova, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Ukraine. These populations range from as few as 206 known stateless persons in Armenia to 262,802 in Latvia (UNHCR 2015b). Controversies over citizenship have similarly come to the fore between Sudan and the Republic of South Sudan and consequently placed thousands at risk of statelessness (Reynolds 2012; Sanderson 2014).28
Human Rights Repercussions
As the previous section illustrates, statelessness may result for many different reasons and is not a condition that affects a particular age group or just one region of the world. A person can be born into statelessness or become stateless later in life, and statelessness is not a problem particular to authoritarian or transitioning regimes. Democracies also create and harbor stateless populations. Despite the wide range of people affected and the diverse ways of becoming stateless, stateless people are everywhere excludable because they belong nowhere. Without citizenship, a stateless person may have to deal with the refusal of identity documents and licenses,29 forced labor30 and enslavement,31 the denial of private sector employment,32 inadequate housing and healthcare,33 as well as the violation of other economic and social rights like social security and education.34 Stateless persons are also susceptible to family separation,35 torture,36 trafficking,37 and indefinite or unnecessary detention,38 while being denied adequate access to judicial procedures.39
Due to the obstacles that stateless people face in accessing various human rights, stateless populations often face higher degrees of chronic illness and unemployment, both of which can affect community development. For example, the poor conditions in which many stateless people live either generate or exacerbate health-related problems. The camps and settlements where stateless people live often lack adequate sanitation facilities and running water. Maureen Lynch describes the situation of the Biharis of Bangladesh:
Lack of water and co-habitation with animals, combined with poor drainage and sanitation systems, contribute to a variety of medical problems, including skin disease, water-borne illness, upper respiratory infections and gastro-intestinal disorders. In one camp, only two working wells supply water to 650 families. In Mirpur’s Millat Camp, there was only one latrine for 6,000 people. Few medical clinics exist, and several camps have no health care at all, leaving entire families susceptible to both medical and related financial hardship. (2005, 15)40
The stateless are also susceptible to other health problems that can run the gamut of chronic illness, sexually transmitted diseases, and drug abuse to psychological issues such as depression, which sometimes results in “alcoholism, domestic violence and suicide” (Sokoloff 2005, 22). Stateless people are often prohibited from receiving government subsidized healthcare and insurance or in other instances do not receive complete coverage akin to their citizen counterparts,41 which results in higher percentages of stateless people suffering from treatable health conditions, such as tuberculosis, high blood pressure, and diabetes.42 Vulnerability to trafficking,43 as well as lack of education and access to health care services, also results in what may be “epidemic” proportions of HIV/AIDS among some stateless groups (Ehna 2004, 5).44 The problem is often compounded when the stateless are directly or indirectly denied access to antiretroviral drugs.45
Children are especially susceptible to HIV exposure from their stateless mothers who cannot always access government-provided HIV/AIDS services or prenatal care generally. Additionally, stateless children may also suffer from malnutrition and treatable illnesses. Lynch notes, for instance, that “Children without birth certificates cannot be legally vaccinated in at least twenty countries and over thirty countries require documentation to treat a child at a health facility” (2008, 12). Such limitations on these children’s ability to access health care can have far-reaching consequences: from the inability to obtain medicines for curing preventable or treatable illnesses to higher rates of malnutrition and even death.46
Beside health-related issues, the stateless often lack access to favorable labor conditions. Studies illustrate that the stateless are regularly channeled into “3-D jobs”—those that are dirty, dangerous, or degrading. Constantin Sokoloff explains, for example, how the Rohingya are forcibly employed by the Myanmarese army, without pay, “for construction and maintenance of [the army’s] facilities, as well as for a variety of other tasks required by the authorities” (2005, 21).47 The denial of opportunities to own land or property and the inability to access credit or obtain business licenses also affects their ability to work.48 As Laura van Waas notes in the case of Syria, “stateless Kurds cannot obtain property deeds, register cars or businesses, open a bank account or obtain a commercial driver’s license and in Bahrain, Bidoon have been prohibited from buying land, starting a business or obtaining a government loan” (2010, 25). Moreover, many states forbid noncitizens from holding certain public sector jobs such as that of teachers or medical professionals. These are just some of the possible problems that a stateless person may face within their state of birth or residence.49
Since international law deems citizenship the formal vehicle by which states extend protection to their populations when they are outside their own state’s territorial confines, the stateless also lack such protection. Moreover, although Article 13 of the UDHR affirms that everyone has the right to leave any country and return to his or her own country, the stateless often face great hardship