Statelessness, Development, and Protection of ‘Disadvantaged Groups’ Development overlaps with socio-economic rights, setting the core and minimum standards and services required by states for everyone in its territory. In every new generation of statelessness, malnourished and uneducated children grow into unemployed adults, with less to offer their children, compared to what their parents offered them, including regressions in generational higher education rate from parent to children. The historical impediments exacerbated by the lack of documentation and ‘legal status’ are constant in the Global South. Historically disadvantaged persons or communities, whose heritage has been disrupted, are often discriminated against and marginalised. This includes their vulnerability to rights violations, illegal detentions, and denial of access to basic services — healthcare, social protection, housing, and education. The Sama Dilaut (a.k.a., Bajau Laut) is a classic example of intergenerational and protracted statelessness, exacerbated by displacement and ethno-religious discrimination. This migratory semi-nomadic group inhabits the South East Asian seas of the territories of eastern Borneo (Indonesia and Malaysia), the west coast of Sulawesi (Indonesia) and the southern Philippines.53 In the Horn of Africa, vulnerable children in Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Ethiopia, whose parents are displaced, including those of mixed parentage or members of cross-border communities remain at risk of intergenerational statelessness.54 Statelessness in Southern Africa is predominantly induced by colonial history, migration, border changes, abysmal civil registry systems, and discrimination based on gender and ethnicity. Four of Africa’s nine biggest countries with stateless populations are in Southern Africa: South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe. No state in the region has a system for the identification and protection of stateless persons, and only a few have adopted national laws and action plans for the protection of civil, political, and socioeconomic rights.55 A critical example is The Bill of Rights enunciated in Chapter 2 of South Africa’s 1996 Constitution, which guarantees the rights to human dignity, equality, nonracialism, and non-sexism.56 Unfortunately, weaponised nationalism, xenophobia, and increasing restrictive migration measures inhibit the implementation of South Africa’s National Development Plan (NDP), aimed to eliminate poverty and reduce inequality by 2030. These further put irregular and undocumented migrants, their children, refugees and asylum seekers, and other excluded minorities at risk of statelessness.57 West Africa is also replete with a poor birth registry, undocumented Helen Brunt 'World stateless children: Stateless at sea' (2017) Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion at 3, available at http://children.worldsstateless.org/3/childhood-statelessness-and-the-sustainable-development-agenda/stateless-at-sea. html 54 UNHCR 'Children, long-term refugees among population at risk of statelessness in Horn of Africa' (2022), available at https://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/press/2022/2/61fba07159/children-long-term-refugees-among-population-at-riskof-statelessness-in.html 55 UNHCR op cit note 11 at 4. 56 Antonia Porter 'The rights of vulnerable and marginalised groups in South Africa' (2018) 2 Centre for Conflict Resolution, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep05159.5 57 Aimée-Noël Mbiyozo 'Statelessness: An old problem with new threats' (2019) 5 ISI, available at https://issafrica.org/ iss-today/statelessness-an-old-problem-with-new-threats 53 71