Better Must Come Act No 35 on 11 November 2003 to extend citizenship to this very group. 80 Even so, some six years on there remained a resident de facto stateless population, so an 18 February 2009 amendment was enacted providing for citizenship to be acquired by operation of law, and with that the issue of statelessness among the Up-Country Tamils of Sri Lanka had been brought to a close. 81 Though the acquisition of citizenship did not necessarily remedy the many rights deficits akin to being stateless, and while it would be absurd to in any way condemn this landmark development, caution must guide any celebration of these matters. FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS In the following Part, an explanation of why the four human rights explored in this study: the right to healthcare, education, employment and political participation is provided. Second, the aggregate findings of the questionnaire surveys and interviews conducted to determine whether the acquisition of citizenship among Sri Lanka’s Up-Country Tamil population has brought with it substantive benefits by way of increased access and entitlement to healthcare, education, employment and political participation are presented. Following from this, a brief discussion of belonging is provided and the findings of the few questions designed to capture whether those who partook in this study conceive of themselves as belonging to Sri Lanka are presented. By providing evidence that some previously stateless persons are still yet ‘to come in from the cold — to belong’, 82 the findings presented below challenge the reigning narrative of ending statelessness in Sri Lanka as a tale of success and are instructive for the global #IBELONG Campaign to end statelessness by 2024. A Four Human Rights: Healthcare, Education, Employment and Political Participation The four human rights that constitute the focus of this study — the rights to healthcare, education, employment and political participation — were chosen for a number of reasons. To begin, in core #IBELONG Campaign content, an inability to access healthcare, education and employment is repeatedly identified as the foremost reason as to why statelessness is a global human rights concern. 83 Such emphasis is reason enough to focus on these three rights. Yet when we look to Sri Lanka’s previously stateless Up-Country Tamil population, we quickly learn that healthcare and education have long been provided by plantation ownership, not to mention that labour on the country’s many tea plantationscharacterises this population’s collective experience. Though this may suggest that there is no reason to explore access to healthcare, education and employment in the wake of citizenship, when placed in context, such access becomes of immediate concern. 80 81 82 83 ibid. ibid. UNHCR Special Report (n 3) 16. ibid; Global Action Plan (n 28); United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, I Am Here, I Belong: The Urgent Need to End Childhood Statelessness (Report, 3 November 2015) <https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/wp-content/uploads/2015-10-StatelessReport_ENG15web.pdf>; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, ‘This is Our Home’: Stateless Minorities and their Search for Citizenship (Report, 3 November 2017) <https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/wpcontent/uploads/UNHCR_EN2_2017IBELONG_Report_ePub.pdf>. 17