Statelessness in the Caribbean. Kristy A. Belton
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have found it difficult to obtain citizenship in the states that succeeded the USSR because those states tried to pass them off as residents of a neighboring state at the time of independence.
Surrounding states may also act as staging grounds for stateless persons to engage in activities aimed at overthrowing a particular regime. As Peter Mutharika notes, “Where political enemies have been expelled and denationalized, they may continue to engage in activities aimed at overthrowing the ruling elite” (1989, 17). He adds that neighboring states may “even be drawn into attempts by some stateless persons to subvert the state of origin” (19). Statelessness is thus not only a human rights issue, but a matter of regional security as well.
International Activity Around Statelessness
Since statelessness is a pressing issue from an individual, community, state, and regional perspective, UNHCR and the Inter-Parliamentary Union have encouraged UN member states to accede to the 1954 and 1961 statelessness conventions as a means of “bolster[ing] national solidarity and stability” and “improv[ing] international relations and stability” (UNHCR and IPU 2005, 49). UNHCR has been actively campaigning for statelessness treaty accession since 2011. As Figure 2 illustrates, there has been a sharp increase in the number of states ratifying the two statelessness conventions since the turn of the century.
Former UNSG Ban Ki Moon also engaged in increasing activity on the issue of statelessness, publishing several reports on the arbitrary deprivation of nationality (UN HRC 2009a and b, 2011, 2013b), another report on discrimination against women under nationality law (UN HRC 2013a), as well as a Guidance Note on “The United Nations and Statelessness” (UNSG 2011). The former Secretary General made clear in the latter report that the UN “should tackle both the causes and consequences of statelessness as a key priority within the Organization’s broader efforts to strengthen the rule of law” (3).
Figure 2. Ratifications of statelessness conventions by decade, 1950s–present. UN Treaty Collection 2016.
While the UN considers statelessness a rule of law issue today, when international concern around statelessness first surfaced in the aftermath of WWII it was primarily tied to another group of forcibly displaced persons—refugees. UNHCR, the body created for the protection of refugees in 1950, did not acquire its second mandate over stateless persons until more than twenty years later through General Assembly Resolution 3274 (XXIX) (UN 1974).56 Since that time, UNHCR’s mandate on statelessness has expanded through a series of other resolutions (UNHCR 2014a). Prior to the establishment of the agency’s second mandate, however, the UN had already produced the two aforementioned statelessness conventions.
The Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (UN 1954) delineates the rights and duties of stateless persons in their states of residence. It asks signatory states to treat the stateless as well as “aliens generally in the same circumstances” regarding the rights of property, association, gainful employment, housing, and freedom of movement and to treat them as well as nationals regarding artistic and scientific rights, access to the courts, elementary education, public relief, and labor legislation. The Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (UN 1961), which followed a few years later, asks contracting states to offer citizenship to children on their territories who would otherwise be stateless, provide an expedited naturalization procedure to stateless people, avoid denationalizing a person arbitrarily, and to ensure that an individual has access to another nationality before being denationalized, among other stipulations. Although more than a half century has passed since these conventions were issued, and despite the fact that there has been an uptick in the number of ratifications since the early 2000s, the statelessness conventions are among the most poorly ratified human rights treaties of the UN system.57 At the time of this writing, and as Figure 3 reflects, of the 193 UN member states, eighty-eight (46 percent) are party to the 1954 convention and sixty-seven (35 percent) are party to the 1961 convention (UN 2016).
Figure 3. States parties as a percentage of UN membership over time, 1954–2016. UN Treaty Collection, 2016.
While fewer than half the UN membership have ratified either of the statelessness conventions as of December 2016, the current UNSG, Antόnio Guterres, believes there has been “a real breakthrough, a quantum leap … in relation to the protection of stateless people” (UNHCR 2011b) over the last few years. For example, a High Level Ministerial Meeting was held in Geneva in 2011 where more than 150 state representatives attended and more than sixty made pledges regarding statelessness: from committing to improve birth registries and acceding to one or both of the statelessness conventions to reducing statelessness on their territory (UNHCR 2012d).
Additionally, in 2010 and 2011 three international expert meetings were held on statelessness. They addressed de jure and de facto statelessness, SSD procedures, and protecting stateless children, respectively. A fourth expert meeting was held in 2013 on interpreting Articles 5 through 9 of the 1961 statelessness convention.58 From this series of meetings and other work, UNHCR was able to issue a series of guidelines on statelessness, which culminated in their Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons (2014g). Within this document UNHCR defines a stateless person under the 1954 convention, articulates the rights and status of stateless persons under international law and provides advice on how governments can create statelessness status determination procedures, among other guidelines and clarificatory points. In effect, this Handbook, along with Guideline No. 4 on a child’s right to a nationality (UNCHR 2012c), can be used to assist a wide array of actors in identifying, and addressing the needs of, the stateless.
Moreover, whereas UNHCR previously admitted that it was “not doing enough” to address statelessness (UNHCR 2007), the organization “has more than tripled its expenditure on statelessness—from USD 12 million to USD 36 million in 2013” (UNHCR 2014e, 6) and “The number of UNHCR operations planning statelessness activities more than doubled between 2009 and 2011, from 28 to 60” (UNHCR 2012a, 45). The activities carried out by UNHCR teams center upon the agency’s four areas of responsibility, including the identification and protection of stateless persons and the prevention and reduction of statelessness. As such, UNHCR has provided technical assistance to states, such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, so that their nationality laws can be modified to prevent and reduce statelessness. It has carried out campaigns, conducted workshops and education programs, and provided mobile birth registration units as well (Manly and Persaud 2009).
UNHCR’s most ambitious campaign to date, however, is the aforementioned #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 2024. Launched in 2014 in partnership with United Colours of Benetton (UCB),59 the Campaign’s central message is that every person on the planet has the right to belong through citizenship. In order to achieve its articulated goal of ending statelessness by 2024, UNHCR published the Global Action Plan to End Statelessness: 2014–2024 (GAP) (UNHCR 2014e).
The GAP contains ten Actions—and fifteen associated goals—that fall within UNHCR’s mandate to resolve and prevent statelessness (Actions 1–5, 7, 9) and to identify and protect stateless persons (Actions 6, 8, 9, 10). These include activities that require political will—such as state ratification of the two statelessness conventions and their grant of protection status to stateless migrants. Other actions demand economic and personnel resources—such as better data collection of stateless populations and the ability of governments to issue ID documents to all those who should hold them. Still other actions demand that governments operate in a transparent and nondiscriminatory manner, especially in the grant, denial, or deprivation of citizenship.60 Although I elsewhere critically evaluate the transformative potential of the #IBelong Campaign, and its ability to end statelessness via the GAP by 2024 (Belton 2016), it is important to note here that the Campaign is an ambitious project the likes of which has not been seen since the international community first came together to create the statelessness conventions in the aftermath of World