SOLVING STATELESSNESS the human family”.° In this utopia stateless people, indeed all people, would be free to live their lives in dignity and to achieve their potential without being affected by prejudice and discrimination. They would have equal opportunities to participate in society and to enjoy a full range of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.° Sadly, in today’s world the stateless are among those situated the furthest from the privileged few. They suffer significant disadvantage and inequality both in their own country, which fails to recognise them as citizens, and in migratory contexts. Moreover, discrimination is often a central cause for their being stateless in the first place. 2.1 Discrimination as a cause of statelessness The various causes of statelessness are well known and include: nationality laws which are discriminatory on grounds of gender (limiting women’s ability to confer, acquire or retain their nationality), race, ethnicity or religion (denying equal access to nationality for ethnic and religious groups), disability and other grounds; conflict between the laws of different States which leave people stateless when they fall through the gaps of legal recognition; State succession leading to new States (or newly redefined States) setting up new criteria for citizenship which may exclude some; the legacy of colonisation, de-colonisation and subsequent nation-building; bad administrative practices both in determining nationality and in relation to documentation which may be needed to help establish nationality; and (the largest category) the inheritance of statelessness, whereby statelessness imposed on a person or community in the past remains unrectified today and is passed on to new generations.’ In many of these circumstances, 6 7 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948, Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A (III), Preamble. See also the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which are based on the fundamental assertion that no one will be left behind. UN General Assembly, Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 21 October 2015, A/RES/70/1. See, R. Govil, “The Sustainable Development Goals and solutions to statelessness”, chapter 2 in this book. These lofty ambitions for the ideal society are influenced by much thinking that has been done on the true meaning of equality. Some of this thinking is articulated in the following, Equality Act 2006 (UK), Section 3; Hepple, supra n3; Equal Rights Trust, Declaration of Principles on Equality, supra n4. For a more detailed overview of the causes of statelessness see, Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless, Wolf Legal Publishers 2014, pp. 23-27. 101