Mapping Minorities’ Vulnerability to Hate Speech minority group in Asia affected by statelessness comparable to the situations in Myanmar and India. II STATELESSNESS: A MINORITY ISSUE INTERTWINED WITH HATE SPEECH? Statelessness constitutes a violation of the basic right to a nationality and must be viewed as a human rights issue that disproportionately affects minorities around the world. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) today more than 75 per cent of the world's known stateless populations belong to minority groups. 17 Considering the lack of awareness of the root causes, underlying and indirect reasons for statelessness in many countries, the connection between minorities and statelessness may not have been apparent enough for public discourse and, thus, has only been sporadically discussed in general debates. Despite UN special rapporteurs reflecting on the nexus between minorities facing discrimination, exclusion, citizenship denial, 18 and the issue of racial discrimination in the context of laws, policies and practices 19 on some occasions, the nexus between statelessness and minorities remained a dormant issue for quite some time. Contemporary discourse has, however, gradually awoken policy discussions in the context of fundamental rights, minority rights and national identity. Consequently, the UN Forum on Minority Issues chose to reflect on the topic ‘Statelessness: A Minority Issue’ during its 11th session on 29–30 November in 2018, aimed at addressing the ‘interconnection between the promotion and protection of the human rights of persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities and statelessness’. 20 The forum sought to consider more closely how human rights violations in minority contexts can be addressed to avoid the denial or deprivation of nationality resulting in statelessness for millions of minorities. The massive overrepresentation of minorities in stateless populations suggests that the denial or deprivation of citizenship may neither be entirely arbitrary nor accidental, but rather the result of deliberate policies and practices that render many of those who belong to minorities stateless and therefore particularly vulnerable in many societies. 21 The selective approach lying behind denationalisation — deprivation of nationality through state action — may be driven by distinct political motives to 17 18 19 20 21 This Is Our Home (n 2) 1 n 1: This percentage is based on statistics for stateless populations included in UNHCR’s 2016 Global Trends Report that are known to belong to an ethnic, religious or linguistic minority, not including ‘minority groups that compose a proportion of a known stateless population in a country but do not form the majority of that population’. See also Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2016 (Report, 2016) <https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/5943e8a34.pdf>. See, eg, Gay McDougall, Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Including the Right to Development, UN Doc A/HRC/7/23 (28 February 2008). See, eg, Tendayi Achiume, Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, UN Doc A/HRC/38/52 (25 April 2018). ‘UN Forum on Minority Issues’, UNHCR (Web Page) <https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/event/un-forum-on-minority-issues/>. Fernand de Varennes, Effective Promotion of the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, UN Doc A/73/205 (20 July 2018) 6–7 [21]. 9