Beirut hosts statelessness dialogue

Women and men from states across the Middle East and North Africa affected by gender discrimination in nationality law gathered last week to discuss their experiences.  This exploration of the connection between gender discrimination and statelessness in the MENA region gave a window into the consequences of women not being able to fully benefit from their citizenship because of their gender.  Organized by the UNHCR and CRTD-A, a Lebanese NGO that focuses on women’s rights, this joint initiative for a conference: Dialogue with Women on Gender Discrimination and Nationality, was held.  Hearing the overwhelming impacts of statelessness from the families themselves- stepping away from the legal and political arguments - gave a moving insight into how living without a legal link to any State leads to a day to day struggle.

Having married a man from Mali, who shortly after having their child left, a mother from Syria told us how this had put her daughter in a hopeless situation.  From not being able to obtain a graduation certificate despite having finished 4 years of university education to having no access to employment, she told how her child who was unable to obtain her nationality was living a life unlike her peers’.  With inaccessibility to any Mali embassy, she is invisible with no prospects of legal marriage.

A  lady married to an Egyptian who had passed away before being able to register their children also shared her story.  Unable to give them her Jordanian nationality, she was left with bringing up six stateless children on her own.  Being the only person in the household who can work and provide for the family, she committed her life to getting an education for her children.  Her eldest son, who she struggled to get trained as a nurse, cannot access work in this field and hence is suffering from depression. 

A child of a mother in a similar position, this time from Lebanon, talked about the direct influence this issue had on his life, his family’s life and the effect this had on the community around him.  Despite being proud of his national sporting achievements and raising the Lebanese flag on an international stage, he cannot obtain Lebanese nationality papers. Two families have been rendered stateless, he cannot obtain the nationality of his country from his mother, his children cannot obtain it from his wife.  The future of his children and the viscous cycle they will continue to be in was what worried him most. 

These are just three of the many intricate stories shared.   Talking to all the participants it was striking to hear the common consequences generations have had to face because the woman married a non-citizen. Hearing and seeing how practical obstacles caused such psychological effects on the lives of many often led to emotional scenes for all.

Another unpromising and discerning theme common between the individuals was the dependency on discretionary acts to help them with their problems.  When asked how they had tried to change their position and what procedures they had taken to address them, there was always one answer. Wasta – having contacts in significant positions.  They all felt that the only opportunity to get help by knowing the right people, and those who knew no-one had no hope of change.   They were all aware of the social political and economic reasons behind the gender discrimination, but understanding the situation did not make it more acceptable.

Many representatives of women’s organizations across the MENA also joined the conference.  On Wednesday they discussed initiatives and strategies they had implemented in their own countries to advocate for change.  Yemeni, Moroccan and Algerian representatives explained the steps they had taken which resulted in reform - although not always exhaustive reform - in their own countries.  These included cooperation with international bodies, religious leaders, media campaigns, and continued pressure - often for many years - on the political decision makers.   There are many types of discrimination across much of the legislation in the region, but none so direct as male-dependent nationality. Often achieving change required changing societal perspectives before approaching legislative reform.

There were periods where the affected participants expressed hopelessness and lacked any real faith in future changes.  Uncertainty of what the future held for their families angered and saddened everyone present. Stories varied, details and procedures changed.  But the suffering between the individuals was the same. All due to a piece of paper they could not obtain. All due to institutional gender discrimination. 

Zahra Albarazi, MENA Project Coordinator, Statelessness Programme

The stubborn cloak of legal invisibility

In the context of the gripping tales of Harry Potter, the invisibility cloak is a magical object. It offers Harry the opportunity to enjoy some innocent adolescent mischief, while it also provides a snug layer of protection when his life is in danger. This is undeniably the invisibility of childhood fantasy and part of its charm and security lies in Harry’s ability to cloak himself in it, or reveal himself, at will. As such, it is difficult to think of a starker contrast with the phenomenon of legal invisibility, which imposes itself uninvited on its victims, is stubbornly resistent to efforts to lift its cloak, creates vulnerability rather than protection and can destroy the innocence of childhood.  

I have just returned from a conference in Belgrade, organised by Praxis – an NGO which is to be praised for both the high quality of its work and its incredible dedication to the human rights issues it seeks to address. For many years now, Praxis has been pushing for a solution to the situation of people in Serbia who lack legal personhood, for whom it has coined the evocative and fitting phrase “legally invisible”. They are people who lack any official recognition from any state authorities of their existence and of their identity. No birth certificate. No ID card. No citizenship document. Nothing. When trying to exercise any right under the law, they are confronted with the problem that legally, they don’t exist – they are invisible to the law. As such, they cannot exercise rights to health care, social welfare, housing, education, they cannot vote in elections, get married legally, register their children or appear as parties before courts or other state bodies, etc. Without recognition of the facts of their birth, or indeed, existence, these “legally invisible” people will often also find themselves at risk of statelessness, because their position under the applicable nationality laws cannot be formally established.

Praxis’ reports and a short documentary film which they have just put together (and we hope will be shared online), use a range of individual case studies to illustrate the ways in which people become legally invisible and why it proves to be such a difficult problem to shake. Here are two examples from recent reports:

Djulijan and Senad Case – Djulijan was born in 1999 in Kosovo Polje and had never been registered into birth registry book. He was admitted to hospital in Belgrade in 2006 using a “borrowed” health card. As a “legally invisible” person, Djulijan could not obtain health insurance, so his parents were forced to “borrow” a health card from their cousin Senad, born in Kragujevac in 2001 and registered into birth registry book […] In August 2006, Djulijan died in hospital, but the fact of death registered into the birth and death registry books was that of Senad, not Djulijan. […] Today, Senad is seven years old and lives as a “legally deceased” person, so he will not be able to enrol in school, receive medical treatment if necessary, or exercise other rights. Djulijan, on the other hand, lived and died as a “legally invisible” person.

Sabaheta Case – Sabaheta was born approximately 24 years ago, at home, as a child from a common-law [unregistered, informal] marriage. Her mother Nurija abandoned her soon after and went to Germany. Sabaheta grew up with her grandfather Miftarem. Today, she lives as a “legally invisible” person with her common-law husband and three children in a Roma settlement in Novi Sad. Sabaheta is not sure whether she was born in Montenegro or in Kosovo. Apart from her mother’s name, she is not acquainted with any other data about her parents. She neither has relatives from whom she could perhaps get these data and obtain mother’s documents. The only recorded evidence on Sabaheta’s existence is a letter of the Social Welfare Centre Niksic, Montenegro, sent to the Social Welfare Centre Zrenjanin in 2006 in which it was stated, inter alia, that Sabaheta is approximately 17 years old and not registered in birth registry book. Besides, she also possesses a certificate confirming that she is not registered in birth registry book in Niksic.

In its reports, Praxis goes on to explain the steps that it has helped people to take in order to establish their legal identity and lift the cloak of invisibility. More often than not, the legal proceedings they initiate are to no avail as the administrative authorities demand a whole host of substantiating documents that the applicant simply cannot produce. The procedures can also drag on for years and there are plenty of examples of legally invisible people submitting a request for so-called “subsequent registration” (i.e. late registration into the birth registry as the key step that formalises their legal existence), which is refused, appealed, sent back to the first instance body for review, refused again, appealed, etc etc. It can be heartbreaking work for the legal assistance team at Praxis and it is mystifying to hear how difficult it is to obtain official recognition from the authorities that a person is indeed living and breathing in front of them.

Unfortunately, it is not only in the small state of Serbia where people are cast into legal invisibility. In my own first encounter with Praxis, at an event on statelessness in the spring of 2010, I slipped into an easy conversation with their inspirational Executive Director Ivanka Kostic. We quickly discovered that the issues she was confronted with bore an uncanny similarity to the situation I had discovered in Lebanon, where I was working at the time. In Lebanon, there is also a significant problem of legal invisibility, affecting a group described in Arabic as Maktoum al kayd, or “unregistered”. In a 2007 newspaper article written by Fatima Rida, the description of one such case is telling:

Malik has vanished from under the bridge where he used to sleep. His disappearance was accompanied with uncertain details that eventually turned into negative signals, especially as it became certain that he has not gone to jail for the “eight” time. “We let him down…so he left and never came back”, bitterly spoke the social worker as she spoke of Malik who frequented her office at a social service center in the southern suburb of Beirut two years ago. The young man had promised her to stop mutilating himself every time the police confronted him “while he waited for an identity card that would shield him from the torture of detention and jail for the eighth time on the charge of homelessness.” He was “accustomed” to pulling a razor he constantly kept on him to cut his hands and legs to keep the police officers away from him because “no one wants me to die in his arms, so they let me go” as he used to say. On the last occasion, the social worker had to inform him that his legal motion to obtain him an identity card was rejected despite all efforts. She adds, “he looked at us as if he knew the answer. Then he left…and vanished after a another clash with the security forces.” [translation from Arabic text published in Al Hayat]

It is unusual for the media to report on this phenomenon and the situation in Lebanon has not received much press since this piece was printed. However, by strange coincidence, on the day that I was in Belgrade, discussing Serbia’s invisible people with Praxis and colleagues from across Europe, a new article appeared in a Lebanese newspaper about the legally invisible there and their exposure to statelessness. There is still much that needs to be understood about the situation in Lebanon and  in Serbia, in order to get to the bottom of why these cases are proving to be so difficult to resolve and why the cloak of legal invisibility is such a stubborn one. And of course there is also a wider and pressing question: who else will Ivanka or I find outselves sitting next to in meetings in years to come, only to discover new stories of legal invisibility in other countries around the world?

Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager, Statelessness Programme

GUEST BLOG: Stateless in Zimbabwe, the Only Country They’ve Ever Called Home

At a time when the country was known as the “breadbasket of Africa”, hundreds of thousands of persons migrated to Zimbabwe, mostly as farm labourers from neighboring countries in Southern Africa. In the initial blush of post-independence, the Zimbabwean Constitution of 1983 acknowledged this migrant population by allowing citizenship to flow from birth on the territory to children whose parents  were citizens, ordinary residents or became permanent residents after their birth.

By the year 2000, it was estimated that around 30% of the two million farm workers in Zimbabwe, and their families, were of foreign descent. In Zimbabwe in total, an estimated 1.5 million persons had links to Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique and up to 12,000 Zimbabweans were reportedly of Indian extraction. By this stage, these were mostly second- or third-generation immigrants. As a result of their family’s long period of residence in the country, and their being born on the territory, these descendants were entitled to Zimbabwean nationality under the country’s Constitution and the Citizenship of Zimbabwe Act.

However, also by the year 2000, the political and economic climate in Zimbabwe had darkened. For the first time, Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, were suffering from cracks in their traditionally solid support-base. Facing the possibility of significant losses in the up-coming 2002 elections, ZANU-PF turned on the population it perceived as the key opponent to its regime; white Zimbabweans. The party launched an aggressive land reform programme, aimed primarily at disenfranchising white commercial farm-owners of the income that was perceived as the financial backbone of the MDC (the main opposition political party).

A less publicized reform which ZANU-PF pushed through Parliament was the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2001. This legislation provided that a citizen of Zimbabwe who, at the date of commencement of the Amendment, is also a citizen of a foreign country would automatically lose their citizenship unless, within six months, they were able to renounce their foreign citizenship in accordance with the law of that foreign country.

Again, the main aim of this reform was to disenfranchise white Zimbabweans, a good deal of whom were still in possession of British passports. Thus, initially, the Director General applied the Amendment only to this group.  As a result, only Europeans were targeted by media campaigns advertising the new law and the deadline for applicants wishing to retain their citizenship. Moreover, the publicity campaign had a limited geographic reach – it is reported that only persons in Harare were at all aware of the new law and its impending deadline.

Before long, however, the new law was applied to all migrant populations, as the increasingly intolerant government became suspicious of anyone with foreign ties. The application of the new provision also came to affect the large community of migrant farm workers, for example, who had worked under white farmers for generations and were perceived as being sympathetic to their political perspective.   

Problematically, however, this extension of the application of the Amendment to all Zimbabwean citizens with foreign heritage was instigated in practice only after the six month deadline had already lapsed.  By this stage, these groups could no longer take any action to prevent the loss of their Zimbabwean citizenship by operation of law.

Furthermore,  Registrar General Tobaiwa Mudede has interpreted the Amendment to cover not only actual dual citizens, but also anyone with a possible claim to citizenship elsewhere.  Thus, anyone who is of foreign extraction, and who did not comply with the six-month deadline for renouncing this presumed foreign nationality, is assumed to have automatically forfeited their Zimbabwean citizenship in 2002.

Indeed, still today, many persons who have a valid Zimbabwean ID document trundle down to their local Department of Home Affairs to apply for the renewal of their passports or identity cards, only to be informed that they are no longer citizens of Zimbabwe. Those who approach the Zimbabwean department of Home Affairs for any services connected with citizenship are now required to submit a “long” birth certificate (which lists the names and nationalities of both parents), and anyone with even one foreign parent is informed that they lost their Zimbabwean nationality in 2002.

The only option available to the hundreds and thousands who were blindsided by this sweeping exercise in denationalisation is to apply for resumption of citizenship. This process still requires conformity with the Registrar-General’s imaginative interpretation of the law, however, in that anyone with a foreign-born parent is required to renounce their claim to that nationality in accordance with the law of that country. The process of renunciation is expensive and lengthy, and in many cases there is in fact no basis for renunciation under the foreign law; either the applicant lacks sufficient proof of their foreign ties or has in fact lost all rights to nationality in the country of their heritage.

Simplified, the problem is this: those who have a foreign parent are assumed by the Zimbabwean administration to have a claim to this foreign nationality. But the one is not a logical corollary of the other; it is quite possible that one is born and raised in Zimbabwe by a Zimbabwean mother and a Malawian father, for example, without ever having accessed Malawian nationality or even visited Malawi.  Under Malawian citizenship law, a person born abroad to a Malawian citizen must exercise their right to Malawian citizenship before the age of 21 and Malawian authorities do not accept a Zimbabwean birth certificate as proof of Malawian descent. Hence, a 22 year old Zimbabwean who possesses only a Zimbabwean birth certificate will never be able to access Malawian citizenship. He is practically incapable, thus, of renouncing this citizenship. And, as a result, he is equally incapable of accessing his Zimbabwean citizenship. He is stateless in the country of his mother, the country of his birth and the only country he has ever lived in.          

The rural farm-working community, in particular, faced a myriad of such barriers. Due to high levels of illiteracy they were largely undocumented and had limited access to information regarding the changes to their birth right to Zimbabwean nationality. Many experience great difficulty in gaining access to the consular services of their heritage country; either for lack of documentary proof of a claim, transport to the consulates or resources to pay for the processing of their renunciation.

In 2003 a further Amendment provided some relief – it allowed anyone who is a descendant of an unskilled migrant worker who came to Zimbabwe from a Southern African state prior to 1980, and who has resided in Zimbabwe continuously from birth, to qualify for resumption and certification of citizenship.  Regrettably, however, the requirements listed in this amendment exclude a large number of those affected by the original amendment and its application. And although the Department of Home Affairs’ implementation of the law has been repeatedly and successfully challenged in Zimbabwean courts, the practice continues to date. For example, in 2002, the High Court ruled in favour of Judith Todd (daughter of former Rhodesian Prime Minister Sir Garfield Todd) whose citizenship had been withdrawn as a result of her failure to renounce her claim to New Zealand citizenship. The registrar-general asserted that Judith Todd ought to have renounced New Zealand citizenship as a result of her father’s birth on New Zealand territory. The court, however, ruled that she had not lost her Zimbabwean citizenship, and ordered that her passport be restored [Todd v. Registrar-General of Citizenship and Another (HC 55/2002) [2002] ZWHHC 76, 7 May 2002].

In practice, however, the Director General respects court orders such as this only as regards the individual which the court order relates directly to. This restricts the applicability of jurisprudence on the withdrawal of citizenship to those individuals who were successful in court only. Hence, only those who are in a position to approach the courts are likely to find redress.

In Zimbabwe, those affected are completely marginalized, their identity documents are seized. The shock of this scramble for nationality has sent ripples of destabilisation throughout the region; undocumented and denationalised Zimbabweans are looking outside for assistance and finding the mechanisms for the protection of stateless persons on the continent sorely lacking.

Guest authors: Rosalind Elphick and Jessica George, Legal Counselors working on Lawyers for Human Rights Statelessness Project, South Africa.

The views expressed are those of the authors.

Statelessness as a utopia

‘My own wish is to be a citizen of the world, to be a fellow-citizen to all men – a pilgrim, better still.’

Desiderius Erasmus, letter to Huldrych Zwingli, 1522.

Statelessness is a problem. All of us, academics, practitioners, activists, and even artists, who work with stateless persons, are sharply aware of the harsh reality of statelessness. Statelessness means instability, poverty, discrimination and despair. We work with the ‘problem’ of statelessness, because the human suffering takes priority over anything else.

But for me, statelessness is more than just a problem. There is something about the idea (and not the reality!) of statelessness that inspires me, that is ultimately romantic, and completely unrealistic. It is something vaguely communist, and maybe even anarchist. It is an idea of an individual who is beyond the state, who does not need the state. A stateless individual is beyond nationalism, wars and borders, not needing to belong anywhere and therefore welcome everywhere. Do you recognise this idea?

The birthday wishes from the Statelessness Programme Campaign put me in a dreamy mood. They addressed important issues – I can relate to all of them, and I wish all these wishes come true. Most of these wishes were policy objectives, lobbying plans and calls for activism. Many of them made me think: ‘Yes, I can really do something about this! If we join hands with all these dedicated people, we can make this wish come true!’. But there was one specific wish which I thought was a wish in the true sense of the word – a wish which cannot be realised within the practical limits of the world, and where you need involvement of some heavy magic:

‘I wish that statelessness soon only means there are no more states’ (a wish from Stichting STIL in Utrecht)

This is the wish I would make if I met a little fairy with a magic wand, or got hold of a Aladdin’s Lamp. It is my dream of a stateless utopia.

I wish sometimes that all people were stateless, and happy in their statelessness. I wish we didn’t need states – neither for practical purposes, nor for psychological reasons. I wish the world could be organised without borders, and individuals had something better to base their confidence on than their national identity. I don’t know how this can ever be true, or whether all my fellow human beings would agree to that, but I can dream, can’t I?

I wonder sometimes whether this image of a stateless utopia actually motivates me to help stateless persons. It is so far away from the reality of my every day working routine. The primary motivation is probably compassion to fellow human beings in great need of legal advice, but there are many categories of individuals who are in difficult legal situations, such as the refugees, the homeless, the ‘illegals’ and so on. There is also, of course, pure intellectual curiosity towards the legal complexities around the phenomenon of statelessness, but English tort law is not less complex, nor is the issue of animal rights. When I think of what makes statelessness so special for me that I am prepared to dedicate four years of my life to study it in a PhD project, and spend my free time giving legal advice to stateless persons, I come back to this romantic, impossible and nothing-to-do-with-reality image. While in my perfect world statelessness means the lack of a state in the life of an individual, I see how in reality statelessness (ironically!) leads to extreme dependence of individuals on states, and I want to do something about it. Even though I will never witness a stateless utopia, I do want to make the life of stateless persons a little less ‘state-full’, so that it does not revolve so much around papers, stamps, and moods of civil servants. I want stateless persons to be more independent, and more empowered in their relations with states.

Even though my dream is nothing but a dream, it clearly shapes the way I see my research. I don’t want to eliminate the problem of statelessness. Instead, I want statelessness to no longer be a problem. I am more interested in researching the issue of protecting stateless persons, rather than eliminating statelessness.

I would of course do anything within my power to help a stateless person to acquire the citizenship of some state, and cease to be stateless, since (alas!) it is often the best way to secure their access to basic rights. But while I would be doing that, I would hope that one day there would be no need for citizenship.

Katja Swider, Research Advice Service Coordinator, Statelessness Programme

“Expat Nationality Services”: a potential money-maker?

Sitting on the plane home from Geneva, where I’ve been helping to teach staff at UNHCR’s headquarters about statelessness, seems the perfect opportunity to write a new blog and share a rather novel idea that actually surfaced during the workshop… going into business providing “expat nationality services”.

The offices of UNHCR, like those of any other international organisations or multinational companies, are a melting pot of people from different parts of the world, holding different nationalities. Over the course of the years that they have spent living and working abroad many have also met and married someone from a different country than their own. Regular rotation from one office – and one country – to another, adds further complexity to the family life of many, with children born in yet another location, sometimes far from either of the parents’ countries of origin. When embarking on a training about statelessness, the intricate web of ties that such international professionals have formed with a whole array of countries creates a ready interest in the issue of nationality and conseqently also the lack of it. Indeed, it is often the case that they have already, more than the average person, reflected on the question of where their nationality comes from and what it means. Moreover, a significant number of participants in such workshops have already personally encountered one type of legal anomaly in the field of nationality: dual citizenship. They themselves, their partners and/or children, will commonly have accummulated two or more nationalities thanks to the path that they have taken in life. As a result, there is a natural curiosity about the opposing anomaly of statelessness.

Given this starting point, one of the ways that I like to introduce the phenomenon of statelessness is by presenting a case which illustrates the lottery-like effect that nationality laws can sometimes have. Since each state can, in principle, set its own rules for the conferral of nationality, statelessness can arise from a straightforward and often unintended conflict between the nationality laws of different countries. Simple misfortune in the circumstances of birth (in nationality terms, that is) can leave a person with neither the nationality of their father, nor their mother nor their country of birth and thus render them stateless. For example, the father may be from a country that does not allow him to transmit his nationality if his child is born out of wedlock and the parents may indeed be unmarried; while the mother is perhaps from a country that does not allow women to pass on nationality to their children at all; and the child may be born in a country that does not recognise this fact as sufficient for the acquisition of nationality. Then, the child will be left stateless, unless the all-important safeguards that we work hard to promote are in place in one or other of the nationality laws. At the same time though, a very slight change in the circumstances of birth – parents who are married, a woman who is allowed to transmit nationality, birth within a state that does grant citizenship to everyone born on its soil – and the person can swing from being stateless, to enjoying single, dual or even multiple nationality. In other words, it can take very little for a negative conflict of laws to become a positive conflict of laws.

The fact that someone’s nationality status can balance on a knife-edge like this is fascinating, especially to people who have, themselves, had to navigate different nationality laws to discover how they or their family members might be affected. While many international professionals and expats are able to take advantage of the opportunity to collect several nationalities for themselves and their children, the reality is that the risk of statelessness also looms over them. Consider, for instance, the nationality laws that allow nationality to be withdrawn from anyone who takes up residence abroad for an extended period of time. Consider the nationality laws that require consular registration, or even return to the country, before any children born to a national abroad are able to secure their father or mother’s nationality. And consider the nationality laws that limit the transmission of nationality to children born outside the country to the first generation only, leaving the second generation in a potentially uncertain position. As mobility increases and the expat community grows worldwide, it becomes ever more important to understand the impact of these and other complexities of different state’s nationality laws, working alone or in conjunction with others.

This observation made and one or two in the room expressing concern at the precariousness of their own or their children’s nationality status, given the ins and outs of the nationality laws which apply to them, one response that I found striking was this: perhaps the highly sophisticated expat services industry should branch out into a new area? Indeed. After all, as important as it is to find the right housing, safely ship your treasured belongings, import your own car, understand a new tax system or locate a new doctor all are… some competent advice on nationality laws and procedures certainly wouldn’t go amiss, to make sure you don’t forget something vital like consular registration which could otherwise cause you or a family member to be cast adrift and join the ranks of the stateless. This may even be a money-making opportunity, using nationality expertise to advise those who can afford to outsource dealing with the issue and maybe injecting that back into projects that provide similar legal assistance to those who cannot pay for such a service. While the high-flying, professional, expat situation is an interesting one, the reality is that the situation of other migrants – those less well paid, less well educated, empowered or connected and those whose situation is all the more vulnerable because it is undocumented or irregular – poses a far greater challenge in the quest to avoid statelessness. Maybe using one to subsidise the other is an effective way forward.

Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager, Statelessness Programme