2019
Statelessness & Citizenship Review
1(1)
in The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, Kristy Belton argues that most of
the world’s stateless have not migrated at all, but rather have been displaced in
situ through deprivation and denial of citizenship. 55 Their plight is similar to that
of refugees and other forced migrants, except they have not and cannot leave the
place where they were born. 56 Such discrimination is enacted through allegedly
neutral laws and banal bureaucratic procedures, 57 such as modernisation of
identity cards 58, yet the outcomes are highly discriminatory. Racialised ‘Others’
are framed as not belonging to the state, and the social contract rescinded. Thus,
democracies are engaged in the production of statelessness through legal,
bureaucratic and political means. 59
A final contemporary risk factor for statelessness is gender discrimination as it
pertains to the right to a nationality for migrant and refugee women’s children.
Birthright citizenship or jus soli provisions have been rolled back in many
different countries in recent decades: 60 Australia (1986), India (1987), South
Africa (1995), New Zealand (2006), UK (1981), Belgium (1992), France (1993
and 1998), Germany (2000), Ireland (2004) and Dominican Republic (2010). 61
Where jus sanguinis policies limit women’s ability to pass on citizenship, their
children also face a risk of statelessness. 62 Gender discriminatory dynamics also
play out in the political, bureaucratic and institutional arenas, limiting women’s
ability to secure a positive migration status, identity documents and consequently,
birth registration for their children. 63 Nonetheless, recent literature on
statelessness has yet to extend its analysis beyond the formal, legal scope of gender
discrimination in nationality and other laws. 64 As I argue elsewhere, 65 the links
between gender and statelessness are indeed legal — but also historical, structural,
political and procedural. A full feminist accounting of the ways in which
patriarchal structures contribute to the creation of statelessness, as Deirdre
Brennan calls for, is much needed. 66
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Belton (n 13) 13.
ibid.
ibid 5.
Allison J Petrozziello, Género y el riesgo de apatridia para la población de ascendencia
haitiana en los bateyes de República Dominicana [Gender and the Risk of Statelessness for
the Population of Haitian Descent in the Bateys of the Dominican Republic] (Centro para la
Observación Migratoria y el Desarrollo Social en el Caribe, 2nd ed, 2017).
Belton (n 13) 15; Lori (n 44).
Aoileann Ní Mhurchú, Ambiguous Citizenship in an Age of Global Migration (Edinburgh
University Press 2014) 5.
See generally Australian Citizenship (Amendment) Act 1986 (Cth); Citizenship Act 1955
(India) No 57 of 1955, as amended by Act No 51 of 1987; South African Citizenship Act 1955
(South Africa); Citizenship Act 1977 (NZ) as amended by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act
2005 (NZ); British Nationality Act 1981 (UK) 29 Eliz, c 61; Code of Belgian Nationality 1984
(Belgium) as amended by the Law of 13 June 1991; loi méhaignerie (France) JO, 1993; loi
Guigou (France) JO, 1998; Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz [Nationality Law] (Germany) 22 July
1913, BGBI III as amended in 2000; Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act 2004 (Ireland) No
38 of 2004; Jillian Blake, ‘Race-Based Statelessness in the Dominican Republic’ in Tendayi
Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge
2017) 107.
Howard-Hassmann and Walton-Roberts (n 1) 7–8.
Petrozziello, Género y el riesgo de apatridia (n 58).
ibid.
ibid.
Deirdre Brennan, ‘Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox: Another Man-Made Problem with
a Feminist Solution?’ (2019) Tilburg Law Review (forthcoming).
144