Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2016/06 1. Introduction We often speak of the right to a nationality as ‘the right to have rights’, but the exact content of this is often left unspecified. Stateless persons around the world are routinely denied access to fundamental human rights, be it through indefinite detention, exclusion from basic education and healthcare services, denial of free movement, or other rights-violating actions. It is not clear, however, that the harm of statelessness itself consists in the violation of these rights. A further relevant consideration may be one’s position as a stateless person relative to the political community. One of the few philosophers to engage with statelessness, Hannah Arendt, presented her understanding of statelessness in The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this paper I explore its relevance for our understandings of statelessness today. I begin by outlining how Arendt understands the harm of statelessness, which is two-fold: it consists in (i) the lack of human rights protection, and (ii) the alienation from the political community. As a response to such harms, Arendt posits the existence of ‘the right to have rights’. I argue that given the enduring relevance of both aspects of the harm of statelessness, we should understand the right to a nationality, or the ‘right to have rights’, not only as being concerned with the right to access human rights X, Y, and Z, but also to be the right to have standing in the political community as an agent worthy of bearing such rights. 2. The Two-fold Harm of Statelessness The cases of statelessness that concerned Arendt stemmed from quite different considerations from those that bring about statelessness today; her concern stems from the background of the Nazi regime and the ‘scramble for Africa’, where those considered outside of the bounds of the political community could be drastically mistreated. Although we face different challenges in relation to statelessness today, her analysis of the harm of statelessness has enduing relevance today. Arendt highlights the process of dehumanization faced by stateless persons through their reduction to ‘mere’ humans: [O]nce they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth.1 The harm identified here by Arendt is two-fold: it consists in the lack of human rights protection (their rightlessness) and in their alienation from the community (that they are the ‘scum of the earth’). In this section, I aim to explicate these two aspects of harm, and to demonstrate their enduring relevance for statelessness today. 2.1. Lack of Human Rights Protection Even in its nascent stage, the human rights regime that has come to dominate international law and politics had elements that could be almost universally agreed upon: both universality2 (in that human rights are assigned to people qua humans) and inalienability (in that there is no situation in which they do not apply to human beings: “one cannot stop being human, no matter how barbarously one is treated”3). Arendt’s analysis, however, aims to demonstrate that such rights are alienable, at least in practice, in that they are in fact ascribed to citizens rather than to human beings qua human beings. Her analysis was not conceptual, but rather demonstrated that human rights could be comprehensively removed for stateless persons, since human rights were predicated on the assumption of their protection through the nation-state system: 1 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 267. Universal, in the sense I use it here, refers to the universal ascription of human rights, not to any purported timelessness. 3 Donelly, Universal Human Rights, 10. 2 1