UNHCR 2014 Statelessness Research Award interviews... Maria Jose Recalde Vela

"The vulnerability of stateless persons to all sorts of human rights violations made me want to somehow help make their situation a little bit better. What I find so heart-breaking about statelessness is precisely the impact this phenomenon has on the individual’s identity: being told you do not belong in the place you identify with can be devastating, as it can make one question who one really is." 

In this series of blog posts, we are asking the students honoured in this year's UNHCR Award for Statelessness Research about their experiences studying the phenomenon on statelessness and their research findings. Third in the series is Ms. Maria Jose Recalde Vela whose thesis How can identity assert a claim to citizenship? In search of a safeguard against statelessness from a legal and socio-psychological perspective.  submitted in completion of the Liberal Arts Programme at Tilburg University (the Netherlands), was chosen by the Jury as the Best Research in the Graduate Category.

Could you summarise, in 2 or 3 sentences, what your research was about?

My research was about exploring how a person’s identity develops in relation to the place and groups a person is influenced by (such as the place one grows up in and the society one grows up around) and whether this identity can somehow be used as a safeguard against statelessness.

What first got you interested in the problem of statelessness?

I first became interested in the problem of statelessness after taking the course at Tilburg University taught by Dr. van Waas during my second year of Liberal Arts and Sciences. I had never heard of stateless before; until I took the course I never even though there were people in this planet without a nationality! Nationality is something that we take for granted, so it is very shocking to find out that there’s around 10 million people without a nationality. What got me so interested in the issue is that the impact statelessness has on the individual is very deep. Stateless persons are not only deprived of basic civil and political rights such as voting for example, but are also affected at an individual and personal level. I am not sure if research has been done on this, but I am sure that statelessness has a massive impact in the individual’s mental and emotional well-being. The vulnerability of stateless persons to all sorts of human rights violations made me want to somehow help make their situation a little bit better. What I find so heart-breaking about statelessness is precisely the impact this phenomenon has on the individual’s identity: being told you do not belong in the place you identify with can be devastating, as it can make one question who one really is.

Why did you choose this particular research topic?

I always took nationality for granted, but at the same time, I was always confused by it. What was always strange is that I always felt like I am not from one single place, but from every place I have lived in. in my short years, I have lived in a few countries (so far, 4), and every time I moved to a new place I developed an attachment to that place, and I developed a feeling of belonging to that place, even if in paper it was not that way and in paper I have one nationality. I started thinking about this and while I was reading Dr. van Waas’ book I came across a section which describes what the “genuine link” is. The genuine link is the social fact of attachment of an individual with a state, and the genuine link is the basis for nationality. The ICJ described nationality as “a legal bond having as its basis a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence.” So in other words, nationality is a legal reflection of this social fact of attachment between individual and state. But state not as in government; state as in, country, homeland, nation-state, etc. A place, a society. Then I started thinking how we develop these social facts of attachment with the places we live in and how this attachment shapes our identities. I felt like my identity has been heavily shaped by every country I have lived in, and this influence the places have had on my identity have contributed to my attachment to these places. I am attached to a place, I feel like I belong there, I have a social fact of attachment to this place. And what is nationality? A reflection of this social fact of attachment. If a person like me has become attached to a place and feels like she belongs there only from having lived a few years there, there is no way any state can tell me that a person who has lived his/her entire life in the same country, many times in the same area, has no social fact of attachment to that country and does not belong there. Many, if not most, stateless persons live their entire lives in the same place for a great number of reasons. However, the challenge for this was that it is not easy to prove a social fact of attachment; it is not something tangible, like a birth certificate for example. A social fact of attachment can mean anything! I thought maybe identity can help solve this problem. However, identity can also be anything! Therefore, I chose to focus on 3 socio-psychological theories that helped me to explain how a person’s identity develops in relation to the place and the society a person grows up in. while doing research, I came across an interesting principle that was proposed by Manley O Hudson: jus connectionis. I had only heard about the jus soli (law of the soil), jus sanguinis (law of blood) and jus domicili (law of residence) for nationality attribution. Jus connectionis? Never heard of it. But it caught my attention. Jus connectionis takes into consideration a person’s connections and identity for determining nationality. Jus connectionis, however, does not have the same status as jus sanguinis, jus soli and jus domicili; it is a theory, a thought, a proposal, an idea. But I thought it was definitely worth looking into, particularly since it could contribute to my search for a safeguard against statelessness.

Could you briefly describe how you went about your research? E.g. did you base it on existing sources – and were they easy to find? Did you do fieldwork or interviews – and what was that like?

I based my research 100% on existing sources; it was a literature review. Carrying out field research on this topic would be very helpful but very complicated due to language barriers and due to the fact that it would take a long time to carry out the interviews and process all the data. Therefore, I based it on all sorts of literature I was able to find. It was challenging to find the literature I needed for it, as you know, there is not much information out there on stateless persons. I was lucky to find some reports in which stateless persons described their feelings of belonging to the place where they had grown up their entire lives.

What was the greatest challenge you had to deal with in undertaking your research?

The greatest challenge was definitely finding literature, since there is not much information out there that can give us a clear view into the identities of stateless persons. One of the most difficult parts was reading and actually understanding the socio-psychological theories and being able to explain them in writing. In Liberal Arts and Sciences, I majored in law, so almost every course I took was a law course. Therefore, I was used to reading legal texts and understanding them. However, social sciences texts, particularly social psychology ones were very confusing for me! I took a few social sciences courses during my bachelor, but none on social psychology, so it was very challenging to read and understand the texts. It was also a lot of fun to get to explore an area that I found so interesting but I was very unfamiliar with.

Could you briefly summarise your main findings or conclusions – or what you think is the most important outcome of your research?

-Citizenship is the legal “confirmation” of a person’s belonging to a group; it cannot be determined simply by looking at a person (this is a rejection of ethnicity and race as the basis of citizenship). A “social fact of attachment” must be determined for citizenship to be properly attributed to an individual

-the social fact of attachment is not tangible; it is embedded in the individual’s identity, so it is important to see how this identity developed and what influenced it. The 3 theories of identity can help explain how identity develops in relation to place and group. Our identities are influenced by our surroundings and the people who surround us. It can be said that the development of our identity is influenced by the country we live in.

-the principles of jus soli and jus sanguinis, which are meant to prove membership through birth on the territory or through blood, are unable to prevent people from becoming stateless, due to strict application of these principles by some states. This strict application makes it easy to exclude people from the citizenry, even though many of these excluded persons have social facts of attachment with said state.

-the principle of jus connectionis which takes into account connections and attachment to a place fills this gap left by the jus soli and jus sanguinis principles. Therefore, the principle of jus connectionis, since it takes into account identity, could serve as a safeguard against statelessness for persons who are excluded from the citizenry since they have no legal claims to citizenship through birth or through blood but do have a claim through their social fact of attachment to their homeland.

Have you found it rewarding to research statelessness – why / why not?

I have found doing research on statelessness—and nationality—the most rewarding experience of my life. I was lucky to intern at the statelessness programme last semester and it was the best, and now I am writing my master thesis on nationality, which I absolutely love. While it focuses on nationality, the idea behind it is finding a new way to help stateless persons. Once you jump on the statelessness train, you won’t be getting off for a long time. There is still so much research to be done that you will never run out of ideas on new things to research on.

What tips would you give to students who are getting involved in statelessness research to help them? E.g. are there particular questions you think they should be looking at or methodological issues they should consider?

Find a topic you find interesting, it will make the process (it’s a long and considerably exhausting process) very enjoyable. I really hope someday someone can go out into the field and carry out interviews to find out more about the identities of the stateless individuals interviewed and maybe use some of the theoretical background I presented in my thesis and use their field results and see what happens! It would be a very large project that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach, but if it ever happens I will definitely read that paper! I think in terms of finding concrete solutions for statelessness there is a lot of research that can be done, particularly looking into how specific countries or regions can find concrete solutions for statelessness in their territories or in the region. Theory-wise, there is so much to do! I am fascinated by the theoretical issues. For example finding the “core” of nationality, or finding concrete reasons to why this concept, which was meant to include and bond people over their belonging to a place, actually has left gaps in the law and its implementation that have rendered millions stateless. One of the problems I had was that there is not much literature out there, so any contributions to the literature are always welcome, and from any discipline! I am not an expert but I feel like statelessness cannot be addressed only from only one discipline: it is such a complex issue that it needs contributions from various disciplines for a better understanding of it, and I think that once we understand an issue it is easier to find concrete long-lasting solutions to it.

GUEST POST: Community Paralegals and the Legal Empowerment Approach to Statelessness

Mohammad Javed is an Urdu-speaking entrepreneur living in the middle of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Looking to grow his business, Mohammad decided to travel to India to start importing spare auto-rickshaw parts for his own repairs and to sell to others. Yet Mohammad was unsure of the process through which he could obtain a passport. He was also intimidated to approach the passport authority office. While a landmark 2008 High Court judgment confirmed Urdu-speakers’ Bangladeshi citizenship and ended their 40 year struggle with statelessness, Mohammad had heard stories of fellow Urdu-speakers being denied passports due to their identity and residence in urban “camps” established by the ICRC after Bangladesh became independent in 1971.

A continent away, Yusuf is a 19-year-old of Nubian ethnicity living in the Kibera slum outside Nairobi, Kenya. Yusuf wanted a birth certificate to access basic services and to reinforce his identity as a Kenyan citizen. For three months, he tried to apply for a birth certificate on his own. He repeatedly went to the relevant government office, which required a trip into town, but each attempt to apply was met with harsh treatment and requests for additional supporting documents beyond those required of most Kenyans. After many failed attempts, Yusuf gave up on getting a birth certificate.

Both Mohammad and Yusuf belong to minority groups that are either emerging from a protracted situation of statelessness or are at risk of statelessness due to difficulties in acquiring legal identity documents like ID cards and passports.  Despite laws and court decisions that establish their citizenship rights, lack of legal knowledge, complex application procedures, and a lack of proper implementation of the law – sometimes outright discrimination – all stand in the way. 

How, then, can Mohammad, Yusuf, and the millions of others like them around the world protect their rights as citizens – obtaining legal identity documents that allow them to prove their nationality, obtain employment, travel abroad, open a bank account, or enroll in school?

Community-based paralegals, also known as grassroots legal advocates, can bridge the gap between law and real life. They use knowledge of law and government, and skills like mediation, education, organizing, and advocacy to seek concrete solutions to instances of injustice. Paralegals not only work alongside clients to resolve a legal issue, but also focus on empowerment -  leaving each client in a stronger position to deal with similar problems in the future.

In Bangladesh, paralegal Nahid Parvin from the Urdu-speaking community
accompanies a client to a Government registration office

Namati, an international legal empowerment organization, is dedicated to the paralegal approach. Since 2013, Namati has been working with Nubian Rights Forum and the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) in Kenya and with the Council of Minorities in Bangladesh to train and support paralegals in communities emerging from or at risk of statelessness.

The Nubian paralegals in Kenya and the Urdu-speaking paralegals in Bangladesh start by educating their communities about the importance of legal identity documents, the eligibility requirements and application processes.

Some people use that information to apply on their own. Others require additional assistance – help with forms, or a paralegal to accompany them to the registration office.  Sometimes the paralegal’s presence alone will make an official think twice before making extra-legal requests. And when an official delays or denies a client’s application for an identity document, the paralegal is there to use the law in negotiations and follow the case through to a resolution.

In the past 18 months, Nubian Rights Forum paralegals have opened over 1,200 cases and several hundred clients have already received their identity documents. In Bangladesh, more than 1,400 Urdu-speaking clients have received identity documents in just one year.

Yet the paralegals supported by Namati and its partners are not only concerned with assisting individual clients. The paralegals are tracking every case to establish an evidence base on how laws are implemented. By analyzing hundreds of cases, the data can be used for high-level advocacy.  Improvements to the law and practice can create change not only for Kenyan Nubians or Urdu-speaking Bangladeshis, but potentially ease access to legal identity documents to all citizens in these two countries.

And as this model of citizenship-focused paralegal services develops, practical resources and lessons will be shared with like-minded organizations, illustrating how community-based justice services can respond to or prevent statelessness around the globe.

This Guest Post was written by Laura Goodwin, Program Director at Namati (www.namati.org). She manages Namati’s Burma Program and Citizenship Program, which is active in Bangladesh and Kenya. She is speaking at the Global Forum on Statelessness on Monday 15 September.

GUEST POST: Childhood in the Migrant City

What are the implications of statelessness for children’s everyday lives? Does the experience of statelessness differ qualitatively from that of ‘illegality’? How do children of migrants and refugees come to terms with the implications of their ‘foreign’ status as they grow up in a country largely hostile to their presence?

These are the some of the questions that I am currently exploring through fieldwork with children in the Malaysian state of Sabah, northeast Borneo. During the 1970s and 80s, thousands of Filipinos arrived in Sabah as refugees from the civil war in the southern Philippines. Later, many more Filipinos came to the state as economic migrants. At the same time, thousands of Indonesians have arrived to work on plantations, in factories or in domestic service, often following old networks of connectivity between Borneo and Sulawesi. Many of these foreign workers and refugees have married and had children in Sabah. However, a combination of different factors (including parents’ undocumented status and uncertainties regarding processes of registration) means that many of these children are stateless.

I arrived in Malaysia in August 2012 and will be here until August 2013 conducting fieldwork with the children of Indonesian and Filipino migrants and refugees. Based in the city of Kota Kinabalu, my primary methodology is that of participant observation: talking to children (in Malay), observing as much as possible of their lives, meeting their families and friends. Each week, I visit a number of different learning centres that provide education to the children of Indonesian and Filipino migrants. Through these learning centres I have got to know a wide range of children with very different experiences of illegality, exclusion and belonging, and with quite varied connections to their parents’ home country. I have discovered that families often have mixed statuses, for example, with some siblings having Malaysian citizenship (often through complex processes of ‘adoption’) and others being stateless, or with mothers sacrificing their own legal status in order to prioritise paying for their children’s documents.

Of course, uncovering children’s own perspectives on illegality and citizenship is by no means straightforward. I am currently working with children aged 8 to 18 and hope that working with this range of ages will allow me to track the gradual emergence of understanding amongst children about their situation. In addition to the conventional anthropological techniques of participant observation, I am also employing a range of different methods designed to engage children and to utilise their strengths. These include drawings, worksheets (for example, asking children to compare Sabah and their parents’ home country) and simple questionnaires. These methods have to be continually adjusted for different levels of literacy, and, as far as possible, I always try to discuss children’s individual answers with them. I have held brainstorming sessions with groups of children where each child is given different-coloured ‘Post-It’ notes to write down or draw what, for example, they are worried about. Recently, because of some difficulties in gaining access to urban children’s lives away from school, I have been lending children digital cameras and asking them to take photographs of what is important to them. After giving them copies of the photos they take, I also ask them to comment, in written or verbal form, on why they chose that picture. One girl photographed the welding workshop where her father works and where her family lives in a small, makeshift house. Next to this she wrote, ‘I don’t have any friends where I live’. Another photographed herself on top of a pile of rubble in the quarry where she lives and wrote, ‘I think this quarry is quite a beautiful view, don’t you?’

Not only are learning centres excellent venues for meeting and talking with children, education itself is a key concern of my research. Although Malaysia is a state party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, it maintains a reservation on Article 28, the obligation to make primary education compulsory and available to all. Since 2002, ‘foreign’ and undocumented children have had virtually no access to public education. In my fieldwork so far, I have talked to many young people who remember when their education was cut short and they were asked to leave Malaysian government schools. I have also researched parents’ strategies for finding schooling for their children, have visited the different learning centres available to undocumented and stateless children in the city, and have spoken with children who have stopped or never been to school. Given the broader exclusions of statelessness, I am hoping to be able to write about both the possibilities for education to offer a route to personal ‘freedom’, and the constraints on the life-enhancing potential of education in the migrant city of Kota Kinabalu.

However, whilst researching the exclusions and problems that children face, I am also keen to counter the assumption, found in some advocacy work, that stateless or undocumented children are somehow ‘lost’, or lacking an identity. Although many children speak about the boredom of immobility, of being confined to the home because they cannot travel freely, they also have strong family ties and a strong sense of their family’s cultural background. When I gave out ‘holiday diaries’ to a group of Indonesian children, I was struck by how many of them wrote about food-filled visits to a wide range of extended family members in Sabah. Attending Filipino weddings, I have seen Suluk children competently and confidently performing traditional dances to large audiences. Other children record these dances on mobile phones and play them back at later occasions, discussing the merits of different dancers. I have also been reminded of the contingencies of national identity by an 11 year-old boy who, when asked what ethnic group he was from, looked fiercely at me and exclaimed, “I am a person from here!”

Work – particularly that of parents – is a key, emerging theme of my research. Many parents work very long hours, often every day of the week, and children become used to taking care of younger siblings, or to helping parents at their workplace. In my final months of fieldwork, I plan to focus my attention on children’s own work. I will be looking at three main groups, assessing the importance of work, and the relative impact of statelessness or illegality on work experiences and choices. These are: those teenagers who have finished school and are working full-time, those children who combine part-time work with schooling, and those who are working and have had no or little schooling. Such places of work include coffee shops, factories, car washes, and furniture workshops, and promise to yield further insights into the everyday lives of children growing up in a migrant city.

 

Catherine Allerton, Lecturer in Anthropology at the London School of Economics

[Catherine can be reached at c.l.allerton@lse.ac.uk]

 

 

 “This is my old house. I don’t have any friends where I live.” (13 year-old Indonesian girl)

 

A Suluk/ Tausug girl’s photo of the Filipino squatter settlement where she lives.