SOLVING STATELESSNESS Statelessness can also result from direct racial or ethnic discrimination.’* For example, the Rohingya - an ethnic, religious and linguistic minority are one of the most vulnerable communities in the world, considered by their home country, Myanmar, to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite having lived in Myanmar for many generations. The Rohingya have been arbitrarily deprived of their nationality and made stateless by Myanmar; its 1982 Citizenship Law clearly discriminates on grounds of ethnicity. In the more recent past, racial discrimination has also caused the statelessness of certain Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic.’® Less obviously linked to discrimination is statelessness occurring as a result of State succession. Historically this has been seen as a “technical”, almost neutral, cause of statelessness.’’ However, closer analysis reveals that here too discrimination may play a significant role. Indeed, most often, “itis vulnerable minorities who are associated with either the successor or parent State who are deprived of nationality, exposing the discriminatory motivations and arbitrary nature for such exclusion”.*® This reality has played out in relation to the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the former Yugoslavia (for example, many Roma are stateless in the Balkan States), Kurds whose country was divided among Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, and Eritreans in Ethiopia.’? The experience of colonisation and de-colonisation is also an example of State succession and caused many of the most large scale and entrenched situations of statelessness in the world today. In M4 15 Supra n3. For more information on the discrimination and arbitrary deprivation of nationality of the Rohingya, see among others, UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana, 2 April 2014, A/HRC/25/64; UNHCR Myanmar, 2014 UNHCR Country Operations Profile; Equal Rights Trust, Equal Only in Name: The Human Rights of Stateless Rohingya in Malaysia, 2014. te For 1” 18 1 more information, see among others, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Report on the situation of human rights in the Dominican Republic, 2015, K. Shipley, Stateless: Dominican-born Grandchildren of Haitian Undocumented Immigrants in the Dominican Republic, 2016; and InterAmerican Court of Human Rights, Case of Expelled Dominicans and Haitians v. Dominican Republic, Judgment of 28 August 2014. See, J. Tucker, “Statelessness in Central Asia: From State succession to solutions”, chapter 11 in this book. Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, supra n7, p. 24. See, for example, K. Southwick., “Ethiopia-Eritrea: Statelessness and State succession”, Forced Migration Review 2009, Issue 32. 103