President's Corner: Praise and Challenges on Ending Statelessness

Today I had the pleasure of listening to Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, praise Refugees International’s work to make statelessness a major human rights issue for both the UN and the U.S. State Department.

Speaking in New York on a panel on statelessness organized by the U.S. State Department, Mr. Guterres said: “Refugees International is playing a major role in raising awareness, in advocacy and in forcing us to do what we need to do, what we are supposed to do. So, it is a welcome pressure that I hope will go on, especially in drawing my attention to the need to be more effective in this area. As a matter of fact, UNHCR in the beginning was probably a little bit reluctant to give enough importance to statelessness.”

After thanking Mr. Guterres for these comments, I began to think about what it takes to make an advocacy campaign to expand human rights succeed.

Statelessness is a major human rights abuse. There are currently between 11 and 15 million people who aren’t citizens of any country. These non-citizens often can’t vote, send their children to school, own property or work. Yet in 2004, when my colleague, Maureen Lynch, started highlighting the fact that millions of people live without citizenship in any country, few people recognized that statelessness was a problem. And fewer still thought there could be quick solutions to statelessness.

In early 2005, Refugees International issued Maureen’s report, Lives on Hold, which remains one of the most comprehensive surveys ever issued on statelessness. The report described the difficulties stateless people face and provided country-by-country detail on stateless populations. She called stateless people international orphans without rights or protections.

Today, the UN, the U.S. State Department and a number of human rights organizations are working to end statelessness, and efforts are beginning to pay off. Nepal recently granted citizenship to 2.6 million people, and both Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates have announced plans to grant citizenship to many stateless people within their borders.

Starting next year, the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights report will have a section of statelessness, and the UN system is working more aggressively to monitor and end statelessness.

Much of the credit for this progress goes to Maureen Lynch, whose persistent quest for justice has made statelessness a front-line human rights issue. Working with our colleague, Dawn Calabia, and a succession of dedicated interns, she took her 2005 findings to the UN, to the State Department, to Congress and to other human rights organizations, looking for allies wherever she could find them.

In almost every case she found an open door. People were willing to listen and, sometimes, to take action.

There are several elements to success that we didn’t appreciate when we started this campaign. First, statelessness is a human rights abuse that is easy to understand; the injustice of not being able to vote, to travel, to send children to school or to receive the protection of a state is clear. Second, it doesn’t cost a lot to address and solve the problem; convincing a country to change its laws or to register newborn babies as citizens is a lot cheaper than setting up refugee camps, for example. Third, the improvement in lives and the enhancement of rights can be dramatic when stateless people receive citizenship.

Despite dramatic progress over the last three years, much more needs to be done. There are still major stateless populations in the Ivory Coast, Kuwait, Syria, Thailand and among Palestinian communities in the Middle East that need protection. The campaign for citizenship rights is far from over.

--Ken Bacon