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]

GUEST POST: The dream of a common identity - Statelessness and Nationality in Africa

Tshepiso* is the mother of a boy named Lefa*, a beautiful two year old child born in South Africa. Lefa would have been no less special had he belonged to any other nation in the world. Unfortunately, in the entire world, there is no nation who will acknowledge his existence and offer him access to citizenship under its legislation.

Lefa is the second generation in his family to be affected by long term rejection of birth registration applications due to an inability to meet the requirements of an overly strict birth registration act. Although Tshepiso and Lefa have a claim to South African citizenship by law, strict birth registration laws and the implementation of those laws have rendered them stateless. Tshepiso has been attempting to access her nationality in South Africa for ten years without success. Both Tshepiso’s and Lefa’s applications for acknowledgement of citizenship have been formally rejected on numerous occasions over a prolonged period indicating that the state does not recognise them as citizens under the operation of its laws.

Tshepiso is a South African through descent in terms of the South African Citizenship Act. She was born in neighbouring country, Lesotho. In order to be formally recognised as a South African, she is required to provide the authorities with a foreign birth certificate from her country of birth. This country is Lesotho, a country with a birth registration rate of less than 25%.

Like many other Lesotho born children, Tshepiso’s birth was never registered in Lesotho. She was sent to live with her grandparents in South Africa by the age of three without any proof of origin. In the last ten years, Tshepiso has tried everything to meet the requirements of the Births and Deaths Registrations Act, but is barred by the absolute requirement of a foreign birth certificate which she has tried, but failed to obtain. She has been undocumented for the past 30 years, despite various attempts at proving her nationality claim.

Lefa’s father is a documented South African citizen. He wants to acknowledge paternity and pass nationality to his son. The South African authorities have repeatedly refused to register Lefa’s birth, because his mother is undocumented. This is blatant discrimination against children born to undocumented parents and against unmarried fathers who cannot acknowledge paternity of a child born out of wedlock where the mother is undocumented. Tshepiso could never legally marry Lefa’s father without a document and Lefa certainly has no control over the lack of documentation of his parents. Nevertheless, Lefa is being punished for his parents’ marital status and lack of documentation through the refusal to register his birth.

It seems contradictory that upon the 20 year anniversary of South Africa’s democracy, there are still people who cannot access the right to equal citizenship. This means that these people are excluded from political participation, affecting the principle of universal adult suffrage which is a founding value of democracy. In South Africa, being documented is compulsory. The new immigration rules are very clear on this point.  However, pre-democracy, not all black people in South Africa were able to register their births nor was there any expectation for them to do so. This apartheid legacy continues for those persons for whom there were no state interventions to assist them with birth registration. There is little understanding or sympathy for persons in this situation.

This makes it almost impossible for children whose parents’ births are unregistered to prove their South African descent. There is a common misconception, amongst state officials and the public, that a person only becomes a citizen once the state has issued the person with an identity document. This often results in the arrest and immigration detention of undocumented citizens.

Labour migration in Southern Africa has been taking place for hundreds of years. There is a mixed-nationality heritage in border communities and often, people are not even conscious of their own nationality status or that of their ancestors. Still, Lesotho, for instance, does not allow dual nationality and South Africa is suspicious of residents who were born or sojourned in a foreign country. The consequence is that whole communities are exposed to the risk of statelessness.

Characteristics of the Apartheid-era in South Africa created a very particular breeding ground for statelessness, including the irregular and incomplete registration of blacks, forced renunciation of nationality claims, the refusal to issue official documents to blacks acknowledging their nationality (passbooks for blacks referred to a person’s tribe rather than citizenship), forced migration due to political persecution and lack of employment opportunities for blacks. Before democracy black people were often forced to renounce a claim to South African nationality if they needed to travel across borders to neighbouring countries.  One person told LHR that he was issued with a Stateless passport in order to travel internationally. The nationality status of blacks who resided in South Africa before democracy is shrouded in the uncertainty caused by race discrimination and neglect.

These prevalent practices during Apartheid all have one thing in common, they affected black people. More critically affected were those living in rural areas where the registration rate was and continues to be extremely low. Other ingrained inequalities of that generation, like gender based discrimination, the invisibility of people with disabilities and poverty increased the vulnerability of this group. It is significantly more difficult for people within this group to prove their identity, than those who were not affected historically. Without proof of one’s parents’ citizenship status it is impossible to access nationality in South Africa. The legacy South Africa has inherited is a continuing inequality in access to equal (or any) citizenship. Apartheid, it seems, lives on.

The African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) has recently adopted a resolution regarding the protection and promotion of the right to nationality. A study into the level of access to nationality in Africa has been launched and all member states are asked to participate. The information gathered from across Africa will support the drafting of a protocol on the right to a nationality in Africa to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.

This is very promising news, especially on a continent where tribes and families have been divided along arbitrary colonial borders and separated through imposed foreign citizenship under colonial rule. These divisions have sparked many conflicts and caused a myriad of violations to nationality rights since independence. Africa is finally taking back its inheritance by pursuing the inclusion of all Africans in its history and its future.

South Africa should sit up and take notice of these international advances in a very important, but severely neglected, field. It is only fitting that a country which has pioneered the achievement of human rights on the continent in the past 20 years should be on the foreground of the achievement of equal nationality rights.

In the meantime Lefa will be going to school soon, but not without a birth certificate. Tshepiso is determined to get her son registered no matter what the cost. Tshepiso’s relentless pursuit of her right to citizenship is truly commendable. I often get a glimpse of the strength of the human spirit through my clients’ lives. I respect them for their perseverance.

In the fight against statelessness, I hope we are fortunate enough to restore more than nationality to our clients.  I hope that we can restore legitimacy by giving them a voice. I hope we can instil in the world a dream of a common identity.

 *Not their real names

Liesl Muller is an Attorney in the Statelessness Project within the Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme at Lawyers for Human Rights in South Africa. Access LHR’s publication on statelessness and nationality here: http://www.lhr.org.za/publications/statelessness-and-nationality-south-africa

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. 

Every child belongs

When raising awareness of the importance of birth registration, organisations like Plan and UNICEF have done a good job of devising compelling slogans, like “Count every child” and “All children deserve to celebrate their birthday”. The message is that every child has the right to recognition of their existence and proof of the facts of their birth as provided through birth registration. This can be critically important for the enjoyment of all sorts of child rights, from protection against early marriage to access to childhood immunisations. These kinds of slogans have the power to portray the importance of what is really a rather dry and technical administrative act to a wide audience in just a few words. Impressive.

Last week I was in Geneva to help teach a specialised short course on Statelessness and Child Rights – a collaborative project of the Statelessness Programme of Tilburg University, UNHCR and UNICEF, piloted for the first time. While I was there, I spent quite a bit of time pondering whether and how we could adopt a similar technique to that above to communicate core messages around statelessness. Just as the human rights language “every child has the right to birth registration” has been translated into the demand to “Count every child”, can we turn the “right of every child to acquire a nationality” into a more meaningful call to action?

Unfortunately, many of those who work on statelessness – including myself – are lawyers by training, rather than communications or public information experts. Yet, as governments, UNHCR, other UN agencies and civil society groups start to engage on the issue more actively, knowledge of statelessness is quickly spreading beyond the lawyerly circles and other expertise is being brought in to operationalise policies to fight statelessness. So, no doubt we will start to see the emergence of increasingly sophisticated ‘marketing’ techniques and hopefully a simplification of the language around statelessness. Already, we see a move away from the message – sadly all too common in older publications – that “statelessness is a highly complex legal issue”. Because, quite frankly, birth registration is a highly complex legal, social, economic and sometimes political issue, but that’s not a particularly helpful way to introduce it to a new audience, which is why Plan and UNICEF have found a different approach.

The challenge then, is to work harder to explain statelessness, or at the very least the importance of fighting statelessness, in a way that any audience could understand and internalise it. This is a vital first step, because without some sense of what the problem is – and that it is a problem at all – no-one will be very motivated to invest the time to learn more about it or take action to address it. For this, we need to take a step back from the legal complexity and look at it from a more down to earth perspective.

One fact that I find particularly compelling and which was emphasised throughout the course on Statelessness and Child Rights is that, in any given year, the vast majority of new cases of statelessness are amongst children. Stateless parents are often powerless to prevent their plight from being transmitted to the next generation. If we are ever to crack this problem and realise the right to a nationality for all, we must stop this senseless spread of statelessness.

What’s more: children affected by statelessness did not choose to be outsiders. Nor do they somehow exist as free radicals without any attachments to a family, a community, a place or a home. They have the same connections as anyone else. They have a country. They belong. Yet their government is letting them down, right from the start, by failing to ensure that this belonging translates into a nationality – a legal bond which formalises their membership of the community and provides protection, rights, empowerment, a sense of acceptance and inclusion. As momentum grows to address statelessness and people from an increasingly diverse range of backgrounds and disciplines, with different skills to offer, join the cause, I hope that there will be a greater effort to distil these types of simple messages and that someone with the know-how to do so will translate them into clever and compelling slogans to help spread the word.

Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager, Statelessness Programme

[This blog was originally drafted for and posted on the website of the European Network on Statelessness, see www.statelessness.eu] 

Stateless people in the Netherlands deserve better

To hold no nationality at all, have no passport and enjoy no right to vote anywhere: that is something special. But not unheard of. Worldwide, over 10 million people are stateless and there are also cases here in the Netherlands. For more than fifty years, the Netherlands has also recognised statelessness as something special and stateless people as having special needs. The UN Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (from 1954) entered into force for the Netherlands in 1962 and this instrument sets out the rights to be enjoyed by stateless people. But just last week, an important Dutch advisory body concluded that “there is no proper instrument to establish statelessness in the Netherlands, which means that often cases of statelessness are left undetermined”. According to the Netherlands Advisory Committee on Migration Affairs (Advisory Committee), this must change because statelessness is something special. Their report, “No country of one’s own” contains a number of concrete recommendations that warrant our attention.

There are different ways in which a person can end up stateless. My first encounter with statelessness was with the little Omar (pseudonym). Omar was a healthy baby with two loving parents. But he faced one considerable disadvantage, right from the start: he had no nationality. He could not acquire his mother’s nationality because she was from a country where women do not enjoy an independent right to pass nationality to their children (still a problem in more than 25 countries around the world today). Nor could he get his father’s Dutch (!) nationality, because his parents were not married. His father needed to recognize his paternal link with Omar before the birth in order to automatically confer his nationality – but he didn’t know that.

Omar is not alone. Of the 2005 people who are registered as stateless in the Dutch Municipal Basic Administration (GBA) a surprising 1400 were actually born here in the Netherlands. While the nationality of these individuals is often not a purely Dutch issue, we are still forced to conclude that the Netherlands is contributing to the creation of statelessness. The Netherlands has a safeguard in its nationality law according to which children like Omar can opt for Dutch nationality after three years. However, in practice, the Advisory Committee has pointed out a number of problems in the implementation of this policy. A particularly troublesome issue is the condition that Dutch law stipulates for the exercise of this right of option, namely that the child is lawfully resident – a requirement that is, quite simple, in violation of the Netherlands’ international obligations (1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness). Thanks to this requirement, many children are unable to exercise their right to a nationality. There are currently 85 stateless children registered in the GBA who were born here and are now four years old or more, but who cannot opt for Dutch nationality because they do not have a residence permit. The Netherlands is failing these children. This is why the Advisory Committee report urges to “drop the condition of lawful stay for the right of option for children born in the Netherlands”.

For many people, the first encounter with statelessness is through the story of Victor Navorski, the character played by Tom Hanks in “The Terminal”. As creatively demonstrated in this film, some stateless migrants find themselves stuck in limbo. In the film, limbo has a physical manifestation: Victor is trapped at the airport, he cannot leave through the exit doors because he has no permission to enter the country, but he also cannot board a plane to leave and go elsewhere because he does not have a valid passport. In the Netherlands, statelessness is also not a ground for a residence permit, but there is also no other country to which a stateless person can return. This can mean that a stateless person spends a long time trapped in immigration detention or is faced with the daily struggle of survival as an irregular migration in the Netherlands. This situation is not in anyone’s interest and requires a humane and practical solution. The Advisory Committee has therefore recommended that the Netherlands establish a procedure for determining whether a person is stateless and the grant of residence on that basis.

The Advisory Committee’s report demonstrates very clearly how the Netherlands can make just a few small policy adjustments to bring real change to a small group of people. It will also help to generate more understanding for stateless people. As a stateless woman once explained in an interview to UNHCR: “When I tell people that I am stateless, what I see in their faces is shock, ignorance and mistrust. Each time you have to explain. It’s as if you have to prove your right to exist!” It is vital to fight against this ignorance. Statelessness is something special, but a stateless person is also a person.

This blog is an English translation of a similar piece that was published on the public comments page of Dutch newspaper Trouw on Thursday 12 December 2013.

Dr Laura van Waas, Senior Researcher and Manager, Statelessness Programme