2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) INTRODUCTION With the introduction of the Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin Act No 35 by the Sri Lankan parliament in October 2003, Sri Lanka’s long stateless Up-Country Tamil population was granted citizenship en masse. 1 Nevertheless, many in this community feel as though the acquisition of citizenship has been of little benefit given that enduring marginalisation and discrimination coalesce to preclude them from claiming the rights of citizenship pertaining to healthcare, education, employment and political participation. 2 In view of the above and based on field research conducted in Sri Lanka’s Central and Uva provinces to determine whether the acquisition of citizenship has provided for increased access and entitlement to four basic rights: healthcare, education, employment and political participation. This paper argues that for some previously stateless persons, recently acquired Sri Lankan citizenship is largely nominal, operating to mask the continued marginalisation of this population and deflect attention from an enduring human rights deficit believed to have been resolved. In so doing, this paper challenges the notion that statelessness ‘can be resolved in a single moment’, 3 and establishes that declarations of Sri Lanka’s success in ending statelessness were made in haste. To expand the scope of this paper, and place it within context of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (‘UNHCR’) ongoing #IBELONG Campaign to end statelessness by 2024, the field research also attempted to determine whether the acquisition of citizenship has provided previously stateless persons with an increased sense of belonging. With respect to Campaign content, the Campaign’s inaugural report states that ‘stateless people want nothing more than to come in from the cold — to belong’. 4 Yet, the legal resolution of statelessness may or may not translate into that which the stateless desire most — belonging — and it is the chasm between citizenship and belonging, or rather, the assumption that the former necessarily entails the latter, that this Campaign has left unaddressed. For this reason, the findings herein are used to assess whether citizenship has indeed provided previously stateless persons with an increased sense of belonging, and are instructive for the global #IBELONG Campaign to end statelessness by 2024. This research is important for a number of reasons. First, it highlights the ongoing discrimination perpetrated on Sri Lanka’s previously stateless UpCountry Tamils in terms of access and entitlement to healthcare, education, 1 2 3 4 P P Sivapragasam, ‘From Statelessness to Citizenship: Up-Country Tamils in Sri Lanka’ in Brad K Blitz and Maureen Lynch (eds), Statelessness and Citizenship: A Comparative Study on the Benefits of Nationality (Edward Elgar 2011); Rebecca Wolozin, ‘Citizenship Issues and Issuing Citizenship: A Case Study of Sri Lanka's Citizenship Laws in a Global Context’ (2014) 16(1) Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal 1; Mythri Jegathesan, ‘Deficient Realities: Expertise and Uncertainty among Tea Plantation Workers in Sri Lanka’ (2015) 39(3) Dialectical Anthropology 255; Christopher Neubert, ‘Power, Everyday Control, and Emerging Resistance in Sri Lanka’s Plantations’ (2015) 24(4) Contemporary South Asia 360; Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, ‘Ordeal of Citizenship: The Up-Country Tamils in Sri Lanka and India’ in Paula Banerjee, Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury and Atig Ghosh (eds), The State of Being Stateless: An Account of South Asia (Orient Blackswan 2016). Sivapragasam (n 1); Wolozin (n 1); Jegathesan (n 1); Chaudhury (n 1). United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Special Report: Ending Statelessness (Special Report, 4 November 2014) 20 <https://www.unhcr.org/cgibin/texis/vtx/home/opendocPDFViewer.html?docid=546217229&query=Special%20Report :%20Ending%20Statelessness%20Within%2010%20Years> (‘UNHCR Special Report’). ibid 16. 6