STATELESSNESS AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE EAST AFRICAN COMMUNITY Similar difficulties can affect Central Africa’s Batwa peoples (of whom some live in Rwanda and Burundi), who face discrimination in many areas of life, and may struggle to provide evidence of connection to an individual state.141 A further category of border populations at risk of statelessness are those living in areas of contested borders—in East Africa often also the areas mainly populated by pastoralist groups. For example, the “Ilemi triangle” on the Kenya-South Sudan-Ethiopia border was never clearly delineated during the colonial period and is claimed by all three countries. An area of more than 10,000 square kilometres (approximately the size of The Gambia), the Ilemi triangle is valued by pastoralists originating from all three countries and from Uganda for its dry-season grazing.142 The Ngok Dinka of the disputed area of Abyei (see below, p. 59) also have a precarious status in both Sudan and South Sudan. Typically in such situations, a country will claim the territory as incontrovertibly its own, but express doubts about the citizenship of the people living there. Vulnerable children The longer it takes to establish nationality for those people where it is in doubt, the greater the risk of statelessness. Those children who are at risk of being stateless fall in various sub-categories; for all, the risks are increased where births have not been registered and birth certificates issued. The devastating impact of statelessness on children was highlighted by the African Committee on the Rights and Welfare of the Child in its General Comment on Article 6 of the African Children’s Charter.143 Gender discrimination in law, such as exists in Burundi, leaves children of mothers who are nationals and foreign fathers at great risk of statelessness, especially where the child’s birth is not registered. Although the constitution provides for gender equality, the nationality law states that women only transmit nationality to their child if born out of wedlock and the father is unknown or if the father formally repudiates the child. Where a child is born in wedlock to a foreign father, nationality can only be acquired from the mother on opting formally to do so.144 However, for the child to acquire the father’s nationality, it is often an additional requirement that the birth must be registered with consular authorities of the father’s country, something almost impossible to imagine for most ordinary people and which might first require establishing documentation of the father’s nationality. Children born out of wedlock face general discrimination in some cultural contexts. In EAC Partner States those born within a settled community will usually not face problems obtaining recognition of nationality, even if the technical forms of recognition required by the law are not in place. However, where the father of the child is obviously foreign (for example of European, Arab, or Asian origin; but also from Somalia or Ethiopia or one of the other Horn of Africa countries), or known to have been so (for example in the case of rape in war time), they may face difficulties in being recognised as nationals of the mother’s country. In Burundi, children born out of wedlock to fathers who were colonial officials, and their descendants, or more recently to fathers working for the UN or NGOs as peacekeepers or development workers, are at risk of statelessness. In addition, and likely more numerous, children of Burundian mothers and Congolese fathers the report by the Kenya Human Rights Commission (an NGO), Foreigners at Home: The Dilemma of Citizenship in Northern Kenya, 2009. 141 See for example, Jerome Lewis, The Batwa Pygmies of the Great Lakes Region, Minority Rights Group, 2000. 142 Members of five ethno-linguistic communities; the Turkana, Didinga, Toposa, Inyangatom, and Dassanech, who are members of the larger ethno-cultural groups of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Sudan, traditionally migrate to graze in the triangle. Nene Mburu, “Delimitation of the Elastic Ilemi Triangle: Pastoral Conflicts and Official Indifference in the Horn of Africa”, African Studies Quarterly, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2003; see also Gilbert M. Khadiagala, ‘Boundaries in Eastern Africa’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (July 2010), pp. 266–78. 143 African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, General Comment on Article 6 of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, 2014, ACERWC/GC/02. 144 Loi No. 1-013 du 18 juillet 2000 portant réforme du Code de la nationalité, Articles 2, 5 and 13. It is not clear how accessible this procedure is in practice; in other countries in Africa with similar procedures they are rarely used. UNHCR / September 2018 39