www.institutesi.org STATELESS IN A GLOBAL PANDEMIC BRIEFING NOTE In 2011, António Guterres – speaking as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees – described statelessness as the world’s “most forgotten human-rights problem”. To be stateless means “you’re not able to send children to school or go to a health centre, to be able to work legally or to have property”, he explained, problems compounded by the fact that “stateless people are in legal limbo”. Today, his successor warns that the stateless now risk being left behind in the response to COVID-19. MAY 2020 “ The right to a nationality is a fundamental human right and in this time of crisis it can mean the difference between life or death. FILIPPO GRANDI, UN High Commissioner for Refugees The majority of the world’s approximately 15 million stateless persons, as well as the tens of millions whose nationality is under threat, lead a severely marginalised existence. Now, the cost of statelessness has risen further as the world responds to the global pandemic, which has exacerbated existing inequalities and made many vulnerable groups more vulnerable. For stateless people, a specific problem arises: deep systemic bias embeds state policy responses to COVID-19 (or any crisis) to put citizens first. Citizens are first to be targeted for public information messages; first to access healthcare services and PPE; first to benefit from emergency relief or economic support packages, to name just a few examples. As states place their own constituents at the centre, non-citizens are left on the side-lines: migrants, asylum seekers, refugees – and the stateless. Where statelessness and migration intersect, stateless migrants and stateless refugees commonly face further discrimination on account of their lack of nationality – presenting an additional challenge to ensuring their protection. Undocumented migrants who are also stateless, for instance, are at heightened risk of prolonged or indefinite immigration detention because there is no country to which they can be returned. However, most stateless persons have never migrated or been displaced, forming a distinct and often hidden population of ‘non-citizens’, whose legal status is often even more precarious. Indeed, they have often been wilfully left behind in their own country, where statelessness is the result of arbitrary deprivation of nationality as a means to further disadvantage, exclude and deny other claims. It is no coincidence that 75% of the world’s stateless belong to minorities. Once made stateless, any claim to status, representation and rights is even more difficult – reducing their already marginalised position to that of an ‘unwanted’ outsider. Consider the situation of the long-persecuted Rohingya of Myanmar, or the emerging statelessness crisis in Assam, India, where close to 2 million have had their citizenship erased amidst international outcry. In such contexts, where nationality is a tool wielded by authoritarian governments, statelessness is not regarded as a barrier to inclusion to be overcome as states respond to the pandemic. Rather, it is something more sinister, as it offers an excuse to further shirk responsibility, target and scapegoat a population that is already excluded, othered and even vilified.