Cate Blanchett, Filippo Grandi: No justification for statelessness

Imagine discovering one day that your identity has been erased. Your passport, driving licence, bank cards, birth certificate, any of the numbers or other identifiers that prove your existence as a citizen, have disappeared.

You can’t get a job or have a bank account and basic benefits are not an option as you don’t officially exist. But your family needs feeding, so you take any work you can find – irregular, poorly paid, maybe dangerous. You’d call a relative to ask for help but your phone isn’t working because your SIM card has vanished. No school has any record of your child so is unable to register her, and the classroom door shuts in her face.

Met the love of your life? You might not even be able to get officially married. No doctor has any record of you, so if you are ill or injured you soldier on alone. Without a nationality and the rights that come with it, you live in fear of abuse, arrest, detention and even expulsion from the country you call home.

This gives you a taste of how things are for stateless people – though for many of them statelessness is not a sudden affliction but something they have endured since birth.

You’d understand something of Tebogo’s ordeal – a boy who never knew his father, lost his mother to illness, and whose grandparents never had identity papers because South Africa’s former apartheid regime deemed that non-whites did not require them. It took a ten-year battle before he was finally issued a birth certificate in 2023, at the age of 25, confirming his South African nationality.

And you’d see how Meepia, abandoned as a baby and raised by relatives who were also stateless, struggled for decades to get access to formal employment, basic rights and services in northern Thailand. Not until she was 34 did she manage to acquire Thai citizenship.

These are just two of the stories recently highlighted by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. They are only two of more than 4.4 million people globally who are reported as being stateless or of undetermined nationality. Indeed, the true number is likely to be much higher; you don’t get counted when you’re invisible, and data is available for only about half the world’s countries.

The effects of statelessness are pernicious. Stateless people describe feelings of being in limbo, living in the shadows, belonging nowhere. And even though there is a ready solution – the grant of nationality – the problem persists. In a world where so much depends on us being recognized as citizens, this is a profound injustice.

For the past decade, UNHCR has led a campaign called IBelong to address the challenge. Over that period, more than 565,900 stateless people have acquired a nationality.

For example, in recent years Kenya has granted nationality to members of the Makonde, Shona and Pemba minorities. Kyrgyzstan was the first country to resolve all known cases of statelessness. Turkmenistan has become the second country to end statelessness and other Central Asian states are following suit. Vietnam has addressed statelessness among former Cambodian refugees and ethnic minority groups. Many other countries have adopted laws to ensure no child is born stateless.  

Yet statelessness endures. It can be the result of deliberate discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity, religion, language or gender – changes in the law that strip persecuted groups of their nationality even if they have lived in the same place for generations. The Rohingya, for example, one of the largest affected groups, are stateless both within Myanmar (due to a discriminatory citizenship law) and outside it as refugees.  

Twenty-four countries still do not let women pass on their nationality to their children on an equal basis with men. Consequently, children can be left stateless when fathers are stateless, unknown, missing or deceased, piling another injustice on top of gender discrimination.  

Sometimes, the causes are less malign – perhaps because nationality laws fail to ensure no one is rendered stateless, or due to bureaucratic obstacles that make it difficult or impossible to acquire or prove one’s citizenship or have a birth registered.  

But there are concrete steps that can and must be taken. Many countries are yet to implement reforms that would confer nationality on stateless people and prevent childhood statelessness. Despite several recent accessions, less than half of UN member states are parties to the 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions. Millions of children are still not being registered at birth, which significantly increases the risk of statelessness.  

The need for action is as urgent as ever. That is why we have created the Global Alliance to End Statelessness, which will unite states, UN agencies, civil society, stateless-led organizations and many others to work together and share good practices, build on the best ways of preventing and resolving statelessness, encourage political and legal reform, and give stateless people a voice.  

This is about more than navigating the everyday world. It is about the fundamental need to belong, to be seen, and to be granted the full rights that are due to all citizens. There is no justification for statelessness, and the solutions are at our fingertips. It’s a man-made problem that we must eradicate – for good.