Chapter One: Understanding, Identifying, and Proving Statelessness A woman comes to your office, asking for assistance in her case. She is in her mid-sixties and has been living in the United States for twenty years without lawful immigration status. Recently, immigration authorities briefly detained and released her, setting a date for her to appear in immigration court. She has one U.S. citizen daughter, and expresses concern about returning to the country of her birth – both because of the potential separation from her daughter but also because of a recent court decision in that country that denationalized many within her ethnic group. She tells you that the government has done the same to others in the past, and she has seen those people suffer discrimination and harassment, be turned away from schools and denied jobs and healthcare, and even be arrested and detained without cause. You ask for her passport, and she says it expired several years prior. How do you begin thinking about her case? Asking whether she might be stateless is a good place to start. Section 1: Overview of Statelessness For the purpose of this Convention, the term “stateless person” means a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law. - 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, Article 1(1)8 A stateless person is a citizen of nowhere. Without a nationality, stateless persons are without the recognition or protection of any country. Today, there are an estimated 10 million stateless people worldwide. Stateless people reside in all parts of the globe—Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas—and they are children, couples, older people, and even entire communities. Their common misfortune—the lack of any nationality—often impedes their access to rights that most of the global population takes for granted. Often, they are excluded from cradle to grave, being denied a legal identity upon birth, access to education, health care, marriage, and job opportunities during their lifetime. They live under threat of detention and exploitation and often face long-term, if not indefinite, family separation. Over a third of the world’s stateless people are children, and the stigma of statelessness follows many of them for the entirety of their lives. Statelessness results from a range of causes.9 These include gaps in nationality laws, state succession, the transfer of territories between states, ethnic or gender discrimination in nationality laws, and discriminatory denationalization. Entire swathes of a population may become stateless overnight due to political or legal directives or the redrawing of state boundaries. Families endure generations of statelessness despite having deep-rooted and longstanding ties to their communities. Others have become stateless due to administrative obstacles; they simply fall through the cracks of a system that ignores or has forgotten them altogether. Still others have been deprived of their nationality through changes in law that leave whole populations stateless, using discriminatory criteria like ethnicity or race. In many situations, if stateless people have children of their own, this new generation will likely also be stateless and the cycle will continue. UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, supra note 3. UNHCR, CITIZENS OF NOWHERE: SOLUTIONS FOR THE STATELESS IN THE U.S., Dec. 2012, pp. 13-14, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/50c620f62.html; see generally Lia Melikian, No Country for Some Men?: Statelessness in the United States and Lessons from the European Union, 43 GA. J. INT’L & COMP. L. 281 (2015). 8 9 3