On the
10th of December every year, Tilburg University joins many other
organisations and individuals around the world to celebrate Human Rights Day:
the day on which, in 1948, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was signed
and the modern human rights era was born. A symposium is convened on campus,
where a human rights topic is explored and the ‘Max van der Stoel Award’ for best
dissertation in the field of human rights is presented. In 2013, the
Statelessness Programme was invited to provide the substance for the Human
Rights Day symposium and give the audience an insight into the lives of
stateless people. Honoured to be asked and excited by the challenge of
summarising the experience of statelessness just half an hour, my colleague
Zahra Albarazi and I set to work and came up with the following provocative
question around which to construct our presentation: “What connects Tom Hanks,
Osama Bin Laden and Albert Einstein?” For those who were unable to attend the
Human Rights Day event in Tilburg, here’s a brief run-down of the answer to
that question…
[Click on the youtube links to watch the short clips we showed the audience on the day]
Now, it
is important to note at the outset of this blog that these three names have
been put together in a single sentence for the sole purpose of explaining about
the different ways in which people can become affected by statelessness. We are
not by any means suggesting that they are otherwise in any way alike or share
anything else in common. Nor, to be entirely accurate, are we actually implying
that Tom Hanks is or was himself a stateless person. Rather, in one of his film
roles, he played the stateless Victor Navorski and it is with Victor’s story
that we opened the symposium.
“Currently,
you are a citizen of nowhere… You don't qualify for asylum, refugee status,
temporary protective status, humanitarian parole, or non-immigration work
travel. You don't qualify for any of these. You are at this time simply... unacceptable.”
In the film ‘The Terminal’, after
demonstrating the demise of his country by bursting a bag of crisps with an
apple (really!), this is how the Director of Customs and Border Protection (played
by Stanley Tucci) explains to Victor Navorksi (played by Tom Hanks) why he is
stuck at JFK Airport. The extract from the film where this happens – a fascinating,
entertaining and immediately heart-wrenching two and a half minute scene – is
perhaps one of the best introductions to the world of statelessness and a
fantastic teaching resource. Very quickly, it (roughly) explains how the
break-up of a state can leave a person stateless without them asking for it,
doing anything or even knowing that it has happened. This gives an immediate insight
into one of the most significant causes of statelessness globally, state
succession, which has left many hundreds of thousands of people stateless –
including in Europe, following the dissolution of the USSR and Yugoslavia. The
same extract also provides a simple and compelling description of a stateless
person: “a citizen of nowhere”, a reasonably sound summary of the international
legal definition (i.e. “a person who is not considered as a national by any
state under the operation of its law”). But perhaps most importantly, the
Director of Customs and Border Protection’s reels off in his little speech all
the forms of protection status which a non-national may qualify for in order to
be allowed to enter or reside in the US before being forced to conclude that
Victor Navorski does not qualify for any of them. There is no tool in his
arsenal for dealing with cases like Victor’s, which is why Victor is simply
left to fend for himself in the international departures lounge of JFK Airport –
prohibited from entering the United States but also unable to board a plane and
leave. The JFK departures lounge becomes a very apt metaphor for the real-life
limbo in which many stateless people are trapped precisely because many
countries do not have a special protection status for stateless people who they
encounter in the migration context. While most do not live at airports, the
reality is that many are considered “unacceptable” and are forced to somehow
find a way to survive without being allowed to enter, reside or work in the
country they are in, but also without the alternative of return or onward
travel to any other country. This problem lies at the heart of the debate about
and emergence of dedicated statelessness
protection regimes, as seen recently for instance in the United
Kingdom.
To take
the story of statelessness out of the realms of fiction, we followed the extract
from the Terminal with two short video clips about Mikhail Sebastian, whose
predicament was once described as “a
sweaty Pacific island version of ‘The Terminal’”. Mikhail became stateless
following the break-up of the USSR and has lived in the United States since
1995. In December 2011, he travelled to American Samoa for what was meant to be
a short holiday, but when it came time to go home to Los Angeles, he was
prevented from doing so by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. In this video
(first 2.20 minutes), Mikhail explains how he became trapped: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Dol2QbNWfs.
Eventually,
after more than a year stuck on the island and after significant media
attention was devoted to his story, student groups mobilised on his behalf and
lawyers argued his case, Mikhail was allowed to return to the United States and
pick up the threads of his life there. But his statelessness remains unresolved
and he continues to face all sorts of restrictions and has to deal with
tiresome bureaucracy. As he explains (minute 4.15 to 5.30) in this film,
Mikhail would dearly love to become a citizen and officially belong somewhere: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4zELYdyXpY.
Back to
the main question of the symposium: what connects Tom Hanks, Osama Bin Laden
and Albert Einstein? Next up is Osama Bin Laden. A lesser-known fact about this
now deceased, notorious international terrorist is that he was stripped of his
Saudi Arabian citizenship in the 1990s, in response to his vocal criticism of the
ruling regime, rendering him stateless. While Bin Laden’s case is unlikely to
evoke concern or compassion, his story is nevertheless illustrative of another
wider scenario in which statelessness emerges. Citizenship policy is, at times,
used as a political tool: wielded in order to silence opposition voices or disqualify
a political opponent from running for election. The latest backdrop against
which such policy has emerged is that of
the Arab Spring, where vocal critics of the ruling powers have become targets
for denationalisation, often leading to statelessness. This 2-minute news
item on Al Jazeera that we showed at the symposium illustrates the problem with
the story of two Bahraini brothers who were stripped of their citizenship in
late 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRiizGbNL24.
The story of the Fairouz brothers is particularly compelling because they used
to be Members of Parliament. From using their citizenship rights to the full –
exercising the right to be elected and representing other citizens – they are
now citizens of nowhere, stateless. There’s a lesson there about never taking
your nationality for granted.
The
final story of statelessness selected for our Human Rights Day symposium was
introduced through the example of Albert Einstein. Einstein was stateless for
five years at the end of the 19th century, after renouncing his German
nationality. Although Einstein initiated his own statelessness and it was
short-lived thanks to his naturalisation as a Swiss citizen (and later also as
a US national), his story is inextricably tied to the plight of the German Jews
under the Nazi regime. Einstein became a refugee in the 1930s and worked
tirelessly on behalf of other German Jews. The large-scale denationalisation of
Jewish exiles and refugees was one of the tools used by the Nazi regime in its
persecution of this population, which brings us to one of the darkest
manifestations of statelessness: that caused by the deliberate, discriminatory
and en masse deprivation of nationality. In spite of the prohibition of
arbitrary deprivation of nationality, laid down 65 years ago in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights precisely because of the dangers inherent in the
manipulation of nationality policy by those in power, instances of collective
denationalisation have continued. Today, a key characteristic of a population commonly
described as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, the Rohingya,
is that they were rendered stateless through arbitrary deprivation of their
nationality. We used this two and a half minute video about the exhibition of a
photography project on the Rohingya,
by Greg Constantine, at the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC in November 2013 to explain the
story: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddu5VethFu4.
This is
how, through the exploitation of loose affiliations to Tom Hanks, Osama Bin
Laden and Albert Einstein, we demonstrated some of the ways in which
statelessness can strike – affecting different people, for different reasons, with
different consequences. Given the setting of a Human Rights Day symposium, we
chose to end on the screening one further short video, from a project that the
Statelessness Programme was involved in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ_Y0hW3DdA.
The story of Um Chadi, who Zahra met in her home in Jordan and interviewed for a project with
the Women’s Refugee Commission, says it all: if you are concerned about
human rights, you should be concerned about statelessness. The human impact is
real and significant.
Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager of the Statelessness Programme
