S P E C I A L R E P O RT / S E C U R I T Y “...a form of punishment more primitive than torture” © UNHCR /A . D’AMATO / J UNE 2 014 A 1 0 -Y E A R C A M PA I G N T O E N D S TAT E L E S S N E S S Security: Living Under Constant Threat “They issued me a driver’s license when I produced an ID. Now I can drive an auto-rickshaw for my livelihood. My two daughters have been admitted to primary school. And now I am planning to move from our settlement.” – A FORMERLY STATELESS URDU - SPEAKING MAN IN BANGLADESH S TAT E L E S S AC H I E V E R S MARGARETHE VON TROTTA inter-communal strife or even civil conflict—but resolution of statelessness can also provide a new start. People become condemned in an unending cycle of repeated imprisonment or remain trapped in their own homes for years. There is an ever-present feeling of potential betrayal, even by friends and relatives, true in the world’s most developed countries as well as in chronically unstable regions. Hundreds of thousands of stateless people live in the West African state of Côte d’Ivoire and when civil war broke out there in 2002, it was fuelled by disputes over Ivorian identity and nationality. Refugee communities across the globe often include stateless people forced to flee their already precarious positions, imposing additional strains on local communities and states. Stateless people often live in a constant state of siege. “I am afraid to go out,” Gabir in Belgium says. “Everywhere I go I am afraid that someone will ask for my identity card.” Um Chadi, a mother of three stateless sons in the Middle East, has had to rescue her son from jail several times after he has been picked up en route to his early morning job. “At 2 a.m. in the morning. Once at 3 a.m. as well, I went to the police station to pick him up. Is that a life? Honestly, it’s not a life.” Stateless people from Myanmar living in Bangladesh became entangled in a vicious cycle of continuous imprisonment for years. Released after initial immigration or criminal sentences, they were immediately re-imprisoned because the authorities were unable to deport them to Myanmar where they were ‘non-persons.’ They acquired their own nickname, ‘the released prisoners,’ and even gained the sympathy of other inmates. Film-maker Born stateless in Germany in 1942 18 NO BOUNDARIES The stigma of statelessness recognizes no boundaries. STAT E L E S S N E S S © UNHC R / G. CONSTANTINE / 2 00 9 S S TAT E L E S S N E S S C A N S PA R K ABOVE Stateless people are often treated as irregular immigrants, and in Britain one third of stateless persons interviewed for a 2011 study said that they had been detained at one time or another for a period of a few days to five years under the country’s immigration powers. “Once I was not allowed to enter my younger daughter’s school since I was not able to produce an ID,” recalls a woman in Sri Lanka who has since acquired nationality under groundbreaking reforms there. “I avoided going to town during conflict times because I did not have an identity card, fearing the possibility of arrest by the police.” As stateless people often lack both nationality and necessary identity documentation, they are vulnerable to arrest or detention, forcible eviction, expulsion and even trafficking. One stateless woman in Thailand recalls, “Businessmen came to look for young girls. These men were human traffickers. I saw some stateless girls go and work as prostitutes.” Insecurity is insidious, always present and invading even the most intimate of relationships. People without papers often cannot own anything. “I have registered my car in my brother-in-law’s name,” one man in the Gulf says. “I like him. I think he is a good guy. However, I keep telling my sister to say good things about me to him. I don’t want him to be angry. I could be left with nothing.” The wheels of justice do work for some. In Thailand, the dispossessed often turn to community leaders for assistance. And there have been a string of recent successes in European, African and inter-American regional courts to resolve human rights complaints on statelessness. STAT E L E S S N E S S Stateless men and women often risk their lives in a desperate bid to resolve their status. LEFT More than two decades after the break-up of the USSR, the only documentation possessed by many stateless people are their old Soviet passports. Statelessness was a root cause of armed conflicts in two African countries in the past 20 years. 19