What it means to be Stateless
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Last Thursday Congress held a special briefing on stateless children, organized in part by our Senior Advocate for Statelessness Initiatives Maureen. The briefing brought together various testimonies highlighting the plight of the stateless, meaning persons who have no legal proof of citizenship and with no country that will grant them this right.
Without any documentation of citizenship, stateless people are often prevented from working, owning land, going to school, voting, and even getting married. With the estimated number of stateless people in the world exceeding 11 million, and forty percent of all births going unregistered each year, stateless children are a particularly vulnerable group.
Maureen and RI are at the forefront of the work on this important issue, particularly with our 2005 report on stateless people entitled Lives on Hold: The Human Cost of Statelessness.
This past fall, Maureen conducted two humanitarian missions that focused on statelessness. The first mission to West Africa, with RI consultant Dawn found that stateless issues are at the root of the ongoing conflict in Cote d'Ivoire. You can read the personal story of a stateless woman in western Cote d'Ivoire by clicking here. And in Senegal, RI found that stateless Mauritanians are in need of protection and assistance to return home voluntarily.
The second mission looked at stateless Haitians. Maureen and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) representative Bernadette found that there are up to one million people of Haitian origin living undocumented in the Dominican Republic. Of these, the group of most concern is the large number of children of Dominican-Haitian descent who are denied the right to citizenship by the government of the Dominican Republic and are not issued identity documents like a birth certificate. This creates a hindrance for these children as they get older and try to register for school.
The problem of statelessness is not going away anytime soon, and it continues to be closely linked with displacement and insecurity around the world. As a result, countries like the US will have to become more involved in assisting stateless persons and in pressuring other governments to stop neglecting these vulnerable populations.
(For more information on RI and statelessness you can read this previous blog entry by our president Ken Bacon).
Without any documentation of citizenship, stateless people are often prevented from working, owning land, going to school, voting, and even getting married. With the estimated number of stateless people in the world exceeding 11 million, and forty percent of all births going unregistered each year, stateless children are a particularly vulnerable group.
Maureen and RI are at the forefront of the work on this important issue, particularly with our 2005 report on stateless people entitled Lives on Hold: The Human Cost of Statelessness.
This past fall, Maureen conducted two humanitarian missions that focused on statelessness. The first mission to West Africa, with RI consultant Dawn found that stateless issues are at the root of the ongoing conflict in Cote d'Ivoire. You can read the personal story of a stateless woman in western Cote d'Ivoire by clicking here. And in Senegal, RI found that stateless Mauritanians are in need of protection and assistance to return home voluntarily.
The second mission looked at stateless Haitians. Maureen and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) representative Bernadette found that there are up to one million people of Haitian origin living undocumented in the Dominican Republic. Of these, the group of most concern is the large number of children of Dominican-Haitian descent who are denied the right to citizenship by the government of the Dominican Republic and are not issued identity documents like a birth certificate. This creates a hindrance for these children as they get older and try to register for school.
The problem of statelessness is not going away anytime soon, and it continues to be closely linked with displacement and insecurity around the world. As a result, countries like the US will have to become more involved in assisting stateless persons and in pressuring other governments to stop neglecting these vulnerable populations.
(For more information on RI and statelessness you can read this previous blog entry by our president Ken Bacon).
Labels: statelessness
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