CITIZENSHIP AND STATELESSNESS IN THE HORN OF AFRICA \Y advantages in terms of access to health and education services and other support, and thus parents in this situation may wish their children to be registered as refugees. However, such registration places the child’s future right to nationality of the country of birth a risk, even if one parent is a national of that state.254 Even if the child may ultimately wish to have recognition of the nationality of the refugee parent, the country of origin of that parent is under no obligation to recognise the nationality recorded in a birth certificate issued by Ethiopia; while the failure to record Ethiopian nationality means that the child may also not be able to access Ethiopian identity documents at adulthood, despite having an Ethiopian parent and entitlement to Ethiopian nationality. An Egyptian-Sudanese-Ethiopian-Eritrean stateless woman in Egypt “Mary was born and raised in Sudan. Her father, who was a Sudanese Christian of Egyptian heritage, abandoned the family when she was eleven. Mary’s mother was of mixed Ethiopian-Eritrean origin and had never formally elected a nationality after Eritrea’s secession. Mary never possessed a birth certificate or any formal identity documents. When she tried to acquire documents by formally applying for Sudanese nationality her request was denied as she was unable to produce any evidence of her father’s nationality. She was denied Ethiopian nationality after the Ethiopian mother to be Eritrean and denied Eritrean nationality as she was Embassy determined unable to fulfil the her evidence requirements. Mary is therefore stateless. She has no legal right to reside in any country and is thus at risk of immigration-related detention. She is unable to enrol in public education facilities or take up legal employment and is therefore forced to risk taking up potentially exploitative, informal work. Mary’s application for refugee status in Egypt was denied, as she had no well-founded fear of persecution.” Case study 3 from Eirwen-Jane Pierrot, “A responsibility to protect: UNHCR and statelessness in Egypt”, UNHCR, January 2013 People without a regularised immigration status The Horn of Africa is a zone of transit as well as origin for migrants, especially for those seeking work in the Arabian Peninsula.2> In most cases, even a person without documents will be able to re-establish recognition of nationality by a country of origin. However, this is not true of all, and lack of access to consular assistance greatly increases risks of statelessness. The children of irregular migrants born in another country, whose birth is registered neither with the state of birth nor with consular authorities, are at significantly increased risk of future statelessness.?°° Another category at great risk of statelessness is made up of people expelled from one country where they are alleged to have been in irregular status (even if this is not the case), to another where they also 234 This has been the case in case of the “double registered” Kenyan Somalis who were also registered as refugees. See Manby, ‘Citizenship and Statelessness in the East African Community’; Keren Weitzberg, We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017). 235 Tuemay Aregawi Desta, “Human Trafficking and Smuggling in the Horn of Africa: Patterns, Dynamics, and Criminal Networks” Life and Peace Institute, Uppsala, September 2016 http://aigaforum.com/article2017/Human-Trafficking-and-Smugqgling-Horn-of-Africa.pdf 236 See discussion in Manby, UNHCR ‘Preventing Statelessness among Migrants and Refugees’. — December 2021