AHMR African Human Mobilty Review - Volume 8 No 3, SEP-DEC 2022 I. INTRODUCTION Statelessness is a significant issue impacting human rights globally and in Southern Africa. The latter region hosts some of the largest stateless populations on the African continent, including in South Africa and Zimbabwe.1 While there is a lack of clear data on the exact numbers of stateless or potentially stateless people in the region,2 the World Bank estimates indicate that more than 130 million people in Southern Africa lack identity and nationality identification.3 For many, this can render them at high risk of statelessness, since many Southern African governments require identification documents to confirm nationality. Denied the right to a nationality, stateless people often face a range of barriers in accessing their fundamental human rights. As Arendt famously observed, nationality is ‘the right to have rights’.4 When nationality rights are denied, the impacts often include a lack of legal status and protection, and the denial in practice of a wide range of human rights, including the right to work, to health and to education.5 While statelessness has profound consequences for the human rights of both men and women, there is growing evidence that women are both more vulnerable to becoming stateless, and more vulnerable when stateless.6 Worldwide, women in general face deep-rooted structural discrimination in public, in the home, and in the workplace, owing to gender inequality and patriarchal norms.7 Pervasive gender inequalities are further compounded for women who face discrimination on multiple and intersecting grounds, including race or ethnicity, and those who are displaced, refugees, or stateless.8 However, as various scholars who have brought attention to the links between gender and statelessness have noted, there is a gap in the literature regarding the many gender dimensions of statelessness.9 In fact, as Brennan contends, gender perspectives, and particularly feminist analysis, have been Aimée-Noël Mbiyozo ‘Statelessness in Southern Africa: Time to end it, not promote it’ (2019) Institute for Security Studies, available at https://issafrica.s3.amazonaws.com/site/uploads/sar32.pdf, accessed on 12 May 2022. 2 Emmanuelle Mitte ‘“Foreigners everywhere, nationals nowhere”: Southern Africa’s changing response to UN campaign on statelessness’ (2021), available at https://africanlii.org/article/20211103/%E2%80%98foreigners-everywherenationals-nowhere%E2%80%99-southern-africa%E2%80%99s-changing-response-un, accessed on 12 May 2022. 3 World Bank ‘Identification for Development (ID4D) Global Dataset’ (2021), available at https://datacatalog.worldbank. org/search/dataset/0040787, accessed on 12 May 2022. 4 Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). 5 David Weissbrodt & Clay Collins ‘The human rights of stateless persons’ (2006) 28 Human Rights Quarterly 245 at 265 6 Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) ‘General Recommendation No. 32 on the gender-related dimensions of refugee status, asylum, nationality and statelessness of women’ (5 November 2014) CEDAW/C/GC/32 at para 51 (CEDAW GR 32). 7 UN Women ‘Progress of the world’s women: In pursuit of justice’ (2011) at 8, available at www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2011/7/progress-of-the-world-s-women-in-pursuit-of-justice, accessed on 12 May 2022. References to ‘women’ in this Article are inclusive of both women and girls of all ages. 8 UN Human Rights Council (HRC) ‘Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, Rashida Manjoo’ (6 June 2011) A/HRC/17/26. 9 See, for example: Deirdre Brennan ‘Statelessness and the feminist toolbox: Another man-made problem with a feminist solution?’ (2019) 24(2) Tilburg Law Review 170; Elizabeth Hooker Here, We Are Walking on a Clothesline: Statelessness and Human (In)Security Among Burmese Women Political Exiles Living in Thailand (MSc thesis, University of Portland, 2013) at 118; Melissa George ‘Comment: The effects of statelessness on gender rights’ (2014) 4 Righting Wrongs: A Journal of Human Rights 1; TL Lee Statelessness, Human Rights and Gender: Irregular Migrant Workers from Burma in Thailand (2005). 10 Ibid Brennan at 179. 1 18