The issue of statelessness has begun to receive attention from a legal perspective. While this work should be commended and continue this article argues that we should also remember that at its core statelessness is a human issue that deeply affects the lives of those who suffer from it. It causes and perpetuates, amongst other things, extreme poverty and human insecurity. Statelessness is still greatly under-examined and under-appreciated as a potentially significant barrier to progress in the humanitarian and development fields.
A working paper on this issue, now available for download on SSRN, aims to begin to situate statelessness as an important issue within these fields. This is done by taking the framework of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and looking at how statelessness affects the realization of each and every goal. This approach shows that by overlooking statelessness development actors and agencies could be failing to meet the needs of the world’s poorest. While far from being a comprehensive analysis of all available literature on statelessness and its relationship to each goal, this article is as an exploratory piece with the aim of encouraging development actors and agencies to recognise the importance of statelessness in their current and future projects and work to gain a greater understanding of the relationship between statelessness, poverty and human insecurity.
Please CLICK HERE to view the paper that outlines these issues. Looking forward to a greater discussion of this side of statelessness in the months to come.
Jason Tucker, Visiting Scholar at the Statelessness Programme
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