Launch of ENS Campaign - None of Europe’s children should be stateless

He has your infectious smile and your partners bright, warm eyes. He shares your jovial nature and your partner’s ease in connecting with people and making them laugh.  He is intelligent, generous, kind – and a little mischievous. You swell with pride as you watch him play thoughtfully with his toy cars, his imagination transforming your living room floor into a world of adventure. You love him in a way that you find hard to put into words and that has caught you by surprise. Life without him is now unimaginable. Yet you still catch yourself wondering if you have done the right thing. Will he blame you when he is big enough to understand? Will he forgive you? Can you forgive yourself? Every day you worry about his future. Will he be able to finish school? What happens if he’s ever seriously ill? What if his ambition is to be a lawyer or an engineer or a politician? What if he wants a family of his own? The anxiety forms a hard lump in the pit of your stomach and sometimes you have to stop watching his carefree playing because the worry rises to the surface and threatens to consume you. Your beautiful boy is just like every other kid, except for one thing. He has no nationality. He didn't ask to be different and try as you might, you and your partner were powerless to do anything. Your son will grow up stateless.

It seems an unlikely scenario and one that must surely only play out a long way away in a somehow less ‘civilised’ part of the world… but in this region too, statelessness continues to arise because European states are failing to ensure that all children born within Europe’s borders or to European citizen parents acquire a nationality. Childhood statelessness stands at odds with the right of every child to a nationality, as laid down in the Convention on the Rights of the Child – adopted 25-years ago today, on Universal Children’s Day. ENS is taking the occasion of this anniversary to launch its new region-wide campaign ‘None of Europe’s Children should be Stateless’. This campaign will raise awareness and promote measures aimed at ensuring that all children born in Europe or to European parents outside the region can in practice realise their right to a nationality.

Like Quis’ kids, now ages six and nine, who were born and raised in Malta, but remain stateless. As reported in the Times of Malta earlier this year, Quis himself is stateless because he is among a large group of Kurds who were arbitrarily stripped of their nationality in their home country of Syria many decades ago, so he has no nationality to offer his children. His wife Nessrin is a Syrian citizen but Syrian law does not allow women to transfer nationality so she too is helpless to provide a nationality to her children. Yes, these are children of foreign heritage and the law and policies in Syria have played a significant role in their predicament – but they are also Europe’s children, born and bred, attending school and participating in society in Malta.

Like Drita’s nine children, none of whom are recognised as citizens in their home country of Serbia, or anywhere else. Drita, a Roma woman, has only recently – and after a lengthy struggle culminating in a court procedure – acquired a birth certificate for herself. She had been living without any personal documents because the birth registry in Kosovo in which her birth had been recorded was destroyed. Before she is recognised as Serbian, however, she still needs to complete further long and uncertain procedures relating to the registration of permanent residence and determination of citizenship. Until she can win this battle for herself, she is powerless to help her children resolve their statelessness. But for Drita’s children and hundreds more like them, Serbia is the only country they know and the place they call home.  

Like Elżbieta’s 17-year old daughter, Marysia, brought home from an orphanage when she was just a toddler, but still stateless today as she stands on the cusp of adulthood. Her story was told in the Polish press last July. Marysia was abandoned at a Polish hospital, immediately after birth. All that anyone seems to know about her birth mother is that she was not from Poland – the Doctor’s wrote Romanian on her mother’s hospital record. But Marysia is not recognised by the Romanian authorities as a citizen and it took a long legal battle for Elżbieta to get even a residence permit for her daughter, even though she was born in Poland and is being raised by a Polish couple. Elżbieta’s last hope in solving her daughter’s statelessness is to wait for the outcome of an exceptional procedure through which the President may, at his discretion, award citizenship.

Like Lin’s two young children, a boy aged 4 and a newborn girl – both born in the Netherlands, both stateless. Lin was only a child herself when, at age 14, she was trafficked from China to the Netherlands. Her parents never registered her birth because of the restrictions of the one-child policy and they were hoping for a son. After being rescued from exploitation and testifying as a witness in the prosecution of her traffickers, Lin tried several times to get the Chinese authorities to confirm her nationality, but they will not recognise her as a citizen. Her children were then unable to acquire a nationality at birth. Although her son, at age 4, is now eligible for Dutch nationality under a special safeguard in the law for stateless children born in the country, the authorities have registered him as ‘nationality unknown’ and this is preventing him from invoking the special provision that is designed to protect him from growing up without a nationality.

None of these parents chose for their children to be stateless – in fact they have been fighting to do everything that is within their power to secure a nationality for them, it was simply beyond their reach. They all fear for what a life of statelessness could mean for their children: hardship, questions, suspicion, denied opportunities, unfulfilled potential, a sense of never quite belonging. No parent should have to experience this anguish. No child needs to be stateless. There are a number of simple measures that governments can be take in order to ensure that children who would otherwise be stateless and who have a clear connection to the country, by birth or parentage, are not left without  a nationality. The new ENS campaign launched today seeks to promote these measures and to raise awareness of the need to tackle childhood statelessness so that we can put a halt to the spread of statelessness in the region. If we can achieve this, we will have taken the first critical step towards ending statelessness in Europe.    

Earlier this year, ENS released a report on Childhood statelessness in Europe: Issues, gaps and good practices. This report concluded that although most of Europe’s nationality laws notionally include safeguards to protect against the risk of statelessness, in reality children continue to be born stateless across the region. ENS is committed to helping to change this picture by: raising awareness on the importance of and measures to prevent childhood statelessness, working with the child rights community to foster a more active engagement on the issue of children’s right to a nationality and promote relevant international standards, conducting further research in order to fully identify what gaps exist in law, policy and practice and developing a better understanding of how problematic birth registration procedures are connected to issues of childhood statelessness. A special feature of this campaign will be an outreach programme to schools and youth to help to raise the profile of the issue and to engage youngsters in creating a platform for change.

Over the coming months, ENS will focus on the research dimension of its campaign work. A number of country studies will be carried out to explore how, when and why children are being left without a nationality and what can be done to address this. ENS will also promote research into cross-cutting issues that affect the problem of childhood statelessness across the region. To this end, ENS will convene a regional conference on the children’s right to a nationality in Europe in June 2015 to discuss the challenges and opportunities around ending childhood statelessness. This will provide a venue for the discussion of ENS’ own research findings, but also for the presentation of relevant research conducted by scholars, NGOs and other experts (a call for presenters with full details will be issued early in 2015). The conference will also be the launch-pad from which ENS will embark on broader and more public-facing campaign activities as part of the second phase of its campaign aimed at strengthening frameworks for the prevention of statelessness among Europe’s children.

If you would like to learn more about the ENS campaign ‘None of Europe’s Children should be Stateless’ and how you can get involved, please email info@statelessness.eu. You can also write to this address to be added to the mailing list for updates about campaign activities and the forthcoming conference.

Laura van Waas, Campaign Consultant and member of the ENS Advisory Committee; Senior Researcher and Manager of the Statelessness Programme

[This blog first appeared on the website of the European Network on Statelessness]

Locked up abroad after the creation of an independent South Sudan

“Your identification, please”. I hand over my passport to the security guard of the former prison while I think of the irony of this place, as most of its residents have been detained because they lack identification papers. I am visiting Thomas Philip Guya (39) at the ‘Vluchthaven’ in Amsterdam, where over a hundred people with rejected asylum claims seek refuge until they find a durable solution.

  

Thomas was born in a small village in what is currently South Sudan, and lived there until civil war forcefully displaced him to the north of the country at age thirteen. He lived in relative peace until violence once more forced him to leave his home. Eleven years ago he fled to the Netherlands for protection. Yet, his asylum claims were rejected “because I failed to prove I was fleeing from Sudan”. As an illegal immigrant, Thomas lives on the margins of society where he is unable to work or build a future. Tired of being an outcast, he now wishes to return to his native place, despite the civil and political instability.

Yet, the creation of an independent South Sudanese state in 2011 complicates Thomas’ ability to return home. When new states are created, the newly drafted nationality laws are often limited in scope, incompatible, or may use tight deadlines. As a result, people may fall through the cracks and are at risk of becoming stateless. Indeed, an amendment to the nationality act of Sudan provides that those who “de jure or de facto” acquire South Sudanese nationality automatically lose their Sudanese nationality, irrespective of a person’s connection to either country. There are no explicit laws for individuals who wish to retain their Sudanese nationality. This poses a particular threat to those living outside the newly created state, as “southerners” had to regularise their nationality status within nine months after the independence of south Sudan.

At this point, Thomas went to see the Sudanese Ambassador in The Hague. “I wanted to go back to Sudan, but the Ambassador of the Republic of Sudan told me I was no longer Sudanese, because South Sudan became an independent country”. Recently, Sudan announced that a decision will soon be made to activate the pending four freedoms agreements, which provides freedom of residence, movement, work and ownership in South Sudan and Sudan. Yet, there remains a lack of political will to resolve the nationality of people who have a connection to both Sudan and South Sudan. A curious face peeks around the colourful sheet that hangs from Thomas’ small bedroom doorframe. “This one is from Sudan,” Thomas explains. “We are friends, but our countries refuse to work together. It’s all just politics”.

Ever since South Sudan set up an Embassy in Brussels, Thomas has been trying to acquire a document to travel back to his native place, of which he only holds vague childhood memories. Yet, the ambassador rejected him, because he didn’t have his identification documents anymore. Thus, neither Sudan nor South Sudan is willing to accept Thomas as its citizen. This suggests that Thomas has become a stateless person. And as a stateless person, you are denied one of the most fundamental rights associated with nationality: the right to return.

Thomas shows me around the Vluchthaven, where he cooks, washes and plays football with his friends. The city of Amsterdam gives him thirty-five Euros per week for food and medication. He explains that he needs medicines for his stomach. He picks up a little jar and shakes it: “There is only one pill left”. When I ask him about his condition, he explains how stress made him sick when he was detained. “They took me from the asylum centre, because I didn’t have any papers”. He was released after fourteen months, and joined the We Are Here movement, which pleads for better treatment of asylum seekers in the Netherlands. He explains that “illegals are not part of the Dutch system. We have no rights, no home, and no job. We have nothing”. He picks up a pile of papers with quotes from politicians and human rights lawyers advocating for better treatment of illegals in the Netherlands. I read the first: “The obligation to carry your ID card forces illegals to live their lives in invisibility to make sure they will not get detained”. Indeed, Thomas explains that inside the Vluchthaven he feels safe, but “when I am out on the streets I am scared. I fear the police because I am illegal. They may detain me again”.

Earlier this month Thomas received some hopeful news. The Embassy of South Sudan in Brussels is willing to provide him with a laisser passer travel document which he can use to return to South Sudan within three months of its issuance. Thomas explains that he doesn’t want to be in the Netherlands any longer. He picks up a recent newspaper article about the fighting in South Sudan, and continues: “…But the situation in South Sudan is also really difficult”. It is also questionable whether Thomas will actually be granted citizenship upon return. “Do you think I should go?” he finally asks me. I hesitate, but respond by asking him where he feels like he belongs in the world. He shakes his head. “There is no home for me in this world. There is only one home, an ideal home, and it is there in my head”.

Roselinde den Boer, Statelessness Programme Research Clinic participant 2013-2014

Statelessness on the agenda in Strasbourg, and Tilburg represented in force!

It is difficult to select a single highlight from my trip to Strasbourg this week. Hearing different UNHCR staff members speak with confidence about the campaign to end statelessness by 2024, which will be officially launched next month? Or hearing the support expressed by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights for the efforts of the European Network on Statelessness (ENS) to help raise awareness of and address statelessness in the region? Or speaking on behalf of ENS at a hearing of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Committees on Asylum and Migration and on Legal affairs and Human Rights about ‘Eliminating Statelessness in Europe’? Or looking out from my position on this panel to see so many familiar faces in the observer seats as ENS members turned out in force to attend the hearing? Or holding a hard copy of the latest ENS publication in my hands – a report on preventing childhood statelessness in Europe that was prepared by the Statelessness Programme in Tilburg, with input from ENS members around the region? Or hearing about new developments and initiatives on statelessness in countries from Italy to Latvia and from the UK to Slovakia? Or looking ahead to the further campaign work of ENS this year, including an online petition for the protection of stateless people in Europe that will be launched in May? Or seeing the reaction (a mixture of empathy and incredulity) of a conference room full of people to the situation of a stateless Tilburg University student when we screened a short film that we helped to produce? Or joining colleagues who are fast becoming friends in enjoying a hearty meal and easy conversation at the end of long days of meetings and in-depth discussions on things like the prospects for EU engagement or strategic litigation on statelessness?

Actually, if I had to pick just one highlight, it would probably (selfishly) be this: posing in the cheesy photo-area in the Palais de l’Europe with the fabulous Valeria Cherednichenko and Caia Vlieks!

Tilburg talents

Valeria is an alumnus of Tilburg Law School who did an internship with the Statelessness Programme while she was studying for her masters in international human rights law and wrote her Masters’ thesis on statelessness. Determined to pursue the issue further when she left Tilburg, she secured a PhD position at Carlos III University in Madrid and set out to research into Spain’s policy and practice on statelessness. Now, Valeria is about to embark on a brand new challenge as a consultant with UNHCR’s office in Brussels to help support statelessness activities around the region in the coming months. Valeria was in Strasbourg to get a head start on this new job (which she officially starts later in the month) by participating in the series of statelessness activities that were being organised there this week.

Caia is a current student of Tilburg Law School, where she will soon complete the Research Masters programme. She also interned with us at the Statelessness Programme and wrote her Masters’ dissertation on whether an obligation to determine statelessness can be distilled from the European Convention of Human Rights. This piece of research – which was incredibly well executed – was identified as a potential resource for discussions that were being initiated within the European Network on Statelessness about the prospects for strategic litigation on statelessness in the region. Caia was commissioned to draft a discussion paper based on her study of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and was invited to Strasbourg to present it to the lawyers and legal aid organisations which were convened to discuss cooperation on strategic litigation (one of the many meetings crammed into this exciting week).

Strasbourg and statelessness

Since the mid-1990s, when the dissolution of the USSR and of Yugoslavia left hundreds of thousands of people in Europe without a nationality, statelessness has been on and off the agenda of the Council of Europe and of its institutions in Strasbourg. In 1997, a dedicated regional treaty providing, among other things, safeguards to ensure the enjoyment of the right to a nationality was adopted: the European Convention on Nationality. A series of conferences on nationality was convened, with legal experts and government policy makers invited to discuss the challenges faced in this field. In 2006, another regional treaty was passed, this one dealing specifically with the avoidance of statelessness in the context of state succession. Various relevant recommendations have been passed by the Committee of Ministers and the European Court of Human Rights has been seized with a number of cases in which the denial of nationality or the impact of statelessness was addressed. A new chapter was added this week, with the adoptionof a further resolution and recommendation on access to nationality.

The debate on this issue by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) was preceded by a special hearing, convened in collaboration with UNHCR, to consider the question of ‘Eliminating Statelessness in Europe’. This session was designed to offer members of the PACE committees on Asylum and Migration and on Legal Affairs and Human Rights a chance to hear or raise themselves some fresh ideas about how Europe can tackle the pressing challenge of finding solutions for the over 600,000 stateless people in the region today. Offering food for thought were a trio of presenters who each brought a different perspective to the issue: UNHCR, a member state government (Italy) and civil society. Representing the latter of these and speaking on behalf of ENS, was me. I had the pleasure to present a newly issued ENS report that discusses the prevention of childhoodstatelessness in Europe. The Statelessness Programme in Tilburg was commissioned by ENS to draft this report with input from ENS members from around the region, and it highlights issues, gaps and good practices before setting out of an agenda for action. The overall message, which seemed to resonate well with the Parliamentarians who had gathered for the hearing: it is undesirable, unnecessary and simply unacceptable that children are still being born stateless in Europe today.  

Packing in events

Taking advantage of the occasion of this special hearing on statelessness, ENS lined-up a series of other meetings and events this week. The first ever Annual General Conference was held on Monday – an important milestone in the development of this civil society coalition which was formed less than two years ago but had already attracted over 80 members spread across over 30 countries. Here we shared plans for activities to support the current ENS campaign to strengthen the protection of stateless people in Europe, including by pushing for the establishment of Statelessness Determination Procedures to ensure access to a protection status. We also considered the future ambitions and work of ENS, including ideas around new campaign issues. On Tuesday, ENS and UNHCR convened a joint conference entitled ‘Stateless but not rightless’, which was also open to other stakeholders and drew approximately 100 participants in total. There we held in-depth panel discussions about how the Council of Europe institutions – in particular the Court (but also the Social Rights Committee) can contribute to a better response to statelessness in the region. A clear highlight here was the eloquent and rousing keynote address by Commissioner for Human Rights NilsMuiznieks who reinforced the message that statelessness in Europe is solvableand that it is imperative that the existing problems not be passed to a newgeneration. Wednesday was filled with a lively debate about strategic litigation opportunities and challenges, marking the beginning of the formulation of a strategy for ENS engagement on this – before the PACE hearing kicked off and the Assembly provided the icing on the cake of a successful week by adopting a resolution and recommendation packed with important messages about states’ responsibilities to address statelessness.  

Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager, Statelessness Programme

Europe must not allow its children to grow up without a nationality

How do you explain statelessness to a child?

Yes, you were born here. And yes, mummy comes from here. And yes, daddy comes from here. And yes, you speak our language. And yes, you celebrate the same festivals as us. And yes, you look just like all the other children who live and play in your neighbourhood.

But no, you are not really one of us. You are not officially a member of our community. You are an outsider. You are an alien. And no, there is also no other place for you to belong. You are stateless.

That’s a tricky thing to explain, but harder still to justify. It’s a sad fact then, that of the 10 million plus stateless people worldwide, it is estimated that half are children: born and now fast growing up without a nationality. How is this even possible when as early as 1930, governments were drawing up international agreements in order to ensure that no child is left stateless? How is this possible when many decades ago, childhood statelessness was already identified as an entirely avoidable problem and the necessary preventative measures were already known (e.g. the norms found in the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness)? And perhaps most intriguingly, why has ‘even’ Europe not succeeded in staving off this problem, despite additional regional agreements that guarantee children’s right to a nationality (e.g. the norms found in the 1997 European Convention on Nationality)?  

The truth, like it or not, is that Europe is still a ‘producer’ of statelessness. Day to day, this may no longer be on the same alarming scale as when statelessness was suddenly created by the redrawing of borders and disintegration of states in the Europe of the 1990s. Nor may it have the same shocking and condemnable undercurrent as when statelessness resulted from policies of mass denationalization in the Europe of the 1930s. Yet I cannot help but be both alarmed and shocked by the fact that it is possible to be born stateless in Europe today. Indeed, this is a significant concern both in countries which already have large stateless populations – such as Latvia and Estonia – as well as where statelessness is a relatively marginal issue. A recent ENS blog highlighted just one of the many thousands of tragic stories of people born without, and growing without, a nationality. And to offer my own country by way of example: of the approx. 2000 people who are listed in the Dutch civil registry as ‘stateless’, it is astounding to discover that 1400 (or 70%) of these individuals were born in the Netherlands.

In order to better understand how, why and where things are going wrong, the European Network on Statelessness took the initiative to compile a report on Preventing Childhood Statelessness in Europe. It draws on existing comparative nationality law research conducted by the European Union Democracy Observatory on Citizenship, existing literature on problems of implementation of nationality laws and information provided by ENS members. This report looks at how Europe is performing with respect to international and regional standards in the fields of human rights, child rights and statelessness all protect the child’s right to acquire a nationality. In light of the overall goal of preventing childhood statelessness it highlights the main issues, gaps and good practices. It is launched this week, on the eve of an important series of events that will take place in Strasbourg from 7-9 April and which will focus on the challenge of addressing statelessness in Europe. The hope is that this will inspire further recognition and understanding of, and ultimately more effective law and policy to combat, the problem of childhood statelessness in Europe.

The report concludes with a series of important recommendations:

1. Ensure that all otherwise stateless children born on the territory of a European state acquire a nationality promptly.

2. Address the inadequacy of safeguards to prevent statelessness for children born on the territory as a matter of priority in those countries with large, existing stateless populations.

3. Ensure that restrictions on the conferral of nationality jus sanguinis to children born abroad do not lead to statelessness.

4. Abolish any difference in treatment in nationality laws with regards to children born out of wedlock.

5. Simplify procedures for birth registration and confirmation of nationality in countries with a problem of intergenerational lack of documentation.

6. Review nationality laws to identify and revise any provisions that could lead to loss of nationality of children, leaving them stateless.

Click here to access the ENS report ‘Preventing Childhood Statelessness in Europe: Issues, Gaps and Good Practices’.

Dr Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager of the Statelessness Programme, Tilburg University. 

Please note that this blog post originally appeared on the website of the European Network on Statelessness, accessible via www.statelessness.eu.