No Legal Bond, No Family Life 17 Even when deportation does not happen, stateless individuals often have problems with re-entering ‘their’ country14 - if they had left the country temporarily they are unable to re-enter to return to their families. This occurs either due to discrimination at the border, or because they possess no documentation and no form of residency permit. Despite growing jurisprudence on countries’ responsibilities to allow stateless individuals to re-enter their country15 with the argument founded on Article 12 of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which provides that ‘No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of the right to enter his own country,’ (not limiting this right to nationals), often states do not consider themselves obliged to allow access of stateless persons into their country. Jordan highlights an example in which this happens. A stateless Palestinian man who was unable to access higher education because he was stateless, left the country to enter the university elsewhere. Yet, when the residency permit he had for living abroad ran out, its renewal was refused by the authorities. His auntie talks about how ‘He has been stuck there for eight years not being able to return. (…) he hasn’t seen his family or mother for the past eight years as he cannot get back into the country. He can only see them through the internet.’16 The daily risks these families face of their members being detained in, deported from, or refused from re-entry into the state because of their status creates severe obstacles in preserving the simple right of a family to live together. 3.3 Property17 The inability of stateless persons to own property highlights how a violation of one right has unintentional direct effect on causing strains on the family. Property rights are often restricted to citizens or severely limited for 14 15 16 17 In some cases, like that of cases with the Bidoon, they are allowed to exit the country for reasons such as education, but often find themselves unable to re-enter. In other cases they may have been forced across the border such as through displacement brought on by conflict. See for example MT (Palestinian Territories) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2008] EWCA Civ 1149 (22 October 2008) and SH (Palestinian Territories) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2008] EWCA Civ 1150 (22 October 2008), MA (Ethiopia) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2009] EWCA Civ 289; [2010] INLR 1 (02 April 2009). Women’s Refugee Commission, Our Motherland, Our Country: Gender Discrimination and Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa (2013), 17. Property rights are one of the few rights that are accorded to stateless persons in the 1954 Statelessness Convention, UN General Assembly, Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, 28 September 1954, United Nations, Article 13. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 11-19