One in 500 people living with no nationality: report

[inanna]

Source: Reuters

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - One in 500 people globally has no nationality, experts said on Monday, a far higher estimate than that used by the United Nations which last month launched a major campaign to eradicate statelessness in a decade.

The number of stateless people worldwide likely exceeds 15 million, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion said in a report, which lifts the veil on some of the most invisible people on the planet.

"This is a powerful message about how pervasive the problem of statelessness is," said Laura van Waas, co-director of the new think-tank. "If every stateless person was counted together as a single country it would be the 70th largest."

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Without a nationality, stateless people are denied basic rights and benefits that most people take for granted, including access to healthcare, education and work. They often cannot own property, open a bank account or even get married.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/15/us-stateless-data-idUSKBN0JT1M020141215?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews

[eppur_se_muova]

1. So ... fix the laws so that not having a nationality is permitted.

"None of the above" should be a valid choice.

[Agnosticsherbet]

2. People are allowed to have no natonality. They do not have a body that supports their righrts

or provides even the most basic care.

What laws would fix that problem?

[happyslug]

3. No nationality is PERMITTED, that is the problem.

We are discussing Nationality as in Citizenship not ethnic group.

In many countries if you are NOT a citizen of that country, you simply do NOT exist, even if your family has lived in that country for centuries. This was a problem for Jews for centuries, they were NOT viewed as members of whatever country they lived in. The Roma has face that problem in various Eastern European nations, through today lack of nationality is mostly a third world phenomena.

Technically that was the position of the US from Dred Scott decision till the passage of the 13th amendment. African Americans were NOT US citizens, despite the fact that they had been in American for over 200 years by that time period, and this applied to not only slaves but freed African Americans.

Countries with large stateless populations which lack clear data include India, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bhutan, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.

For more details see:

http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c155.html

More than 1 million people in Myanmar's Rakhine state are stateless on the basis of the current citizenship law. In the Dominican Republic, a Constitutional Court ruling in 2013 applied new nationality criteria retroactively and affected the nationality status of tens of thousands of people of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic.

However, there have been notable examples where, through political will, it has been possible to resolve large protracted situations of statelessness. For example, the case of some 300,000 Urdu-speakers (sometimes referred to as Biharis), was resolved in Bangladesh in 2008. Similarly, the situation of the Brasileirinhos Apatridás, stateless children born to Brazilian parents abroad who were unable to acquire Brazilian nationality unless they went back to live in Brazil, was resolved in 2007.

http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c15e.html

Here is the Dred Scot decision as to African American being non-US citizens:

“In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument...They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2011/03/no-rights-which-white-man-was-bound-to.html

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/60/393#writing-USSC_CR_0060_0393_ZC