Ms Linda Peels,
22 years old, Dutch
Studying: International and European Law, Bachelor Programme
Internship Project: Organisational support for the “First Global Forum on Statelessness” in September 2014, co-hosted by UNHCR and the Statelessness Programme.
Last year I attended a pub lecture on statelessness,
given by Laura van Waas. I had never heard of this topic before, but after
Laura’s lecture I immediately wanted to learn more about this phenomenon, in
particular how it could possibly happen that someone did not have a
nationality. I was thrilled when I saw that The Statelessness Programme was
looking for an intern.
My internship focusses mainly on the organisational
part of the 2014 Global Forum. When I first started, I have to admit I was a
bit in doubt whether I would actually learn a lot about the academic side of statelessness,
since this is not the main focus of my internship. So alongside my internship, I also enrolled for the course “Nationality,
Statelessness and Human Rights”, created by the Statelessness Programme.
However, my doubt turned out to be for nothing: from
my first day on, I had – and still have-
to write so many people and explain to them what statelessness is and
why this conference is so important, that I was forced to look into the topic and
the definition to deepen my knowledge. Many questions arose, differing from
very practical, such as how many NGOs are actually working on statelessness –
not that many by the way- , to very academic, for instance how we should interpret
the definition of statelessness given in art 1 of the 1954 UN Convention
Relating to The Status of Stateless Persons, or how safeguards should be
implemented in nationality laws to prevent statelessness.
For these questions, the combination of studying the
topic during class and working on the topic during my internship is perfect: I
get to work with both the practical obstacles and questions as well as the
academic side of statelessness, which really helps me to understand this
complex phenomenon and to explain what it is in a way that non-academics will
understand it too. I found the answers to my questions, not only in literature
during class, but also by working on the topic during my internship.
To give you an idea of what organising of such an
extraordinary event implies, I will elaborate a bit more on what I am currently
working on. The idea is to hold a conference for both academics and policy
makers. On this point, we are trying to map NGOs who are working on the topic,
we are looking for academics as key note speakers and we are mapping
governments that have done a lot to prevent statelessness, for instance
Indonesia, who has changed their nationality law and built in more safeguards
to prevent statelessness. We hope to attract some 300 academics, governments
representatives, key UN staff, NGO’s or legal practitioners working on human
rights, refugees and stateless people with various international backgrounds.
We have to make sure we keep a balance between policy developers and academics,
since the hoped outcome of the conference implies both encouraging new research
on statelessness and the development of better nationality laws or other
policies, for instance giving stateless people access to Micro Finance
Intuitions – see Jason’s latest blog post.
The conference aims to raise the profile of
statelessness by giving academics and governments representatives the
opportunity to share their research, experiences and achievements in tackling
the issue. We also hope to provide a podium for the stateless and to give them
a voice.
Since I first started I have met such wonderful people
who are always willing to answer my questions. I have already learned a lot
about the topic of statelessness, the mandate of the UNHCR and the people
working on statelessness, and I still have more than a year left full of
learning and experiences!
Linda Peels, intern with the Statelessness Programme
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