‘Humanising’ Statelessness INTRODUCTION We breathe, we bleed, we vibrate under the same sky as you. Our cries are whispers, our shouts are demands. Our love utterances are curses… We pulse at within and among these as you do. Yet, in your need to recognise, hypothesise, categorise, theorise, legalise, you forget to humanise. We are not stateless, and we are not merely a word. Within the act of listening lives the right to be heard. 1 Statelessness is defined as the absence of a legal bond between the state and its individuals. This is evident in the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (‘1954 Convention’), which in art 1(1) defines a stateless person as, ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’. 2 Article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everybody has a right to nationality and nobody should arbitrarily be deprived of nationality. 3 Those who do not have this fundamental right are considered stateless and may not enjoy the rights of citizenship offered by a state. Often, this legal bond with the state is intricately related to those rights associated with citizenship, meaning non-citizens are unable to enjoy the same domestic standard of rights that citizens do. 4 This is no surprise when the existing legal and political discourses focus on the citizenship, nationality and legal aspects of statelessness. The legal discourse sees the issue as a ‘legal anomaly’ and the stateless are treated as ‘non-persons’ and ‘legal ghosts’. 5 Such rhetoric confirms statelessness as nothing more than a formalised condition of insecurity and inferiority, makes stateless people invisible and places emphasis upon the sovereign power of states to differentiate between who might appear or disappear under the operation of its law; who does or does not belong. 6 The ‘ghostliness’ of stateless persons portrayed in legal discourses dehumanises the issue by ignoring their feelings, perceptions and experiences. There is a growing sentiment among academics that legal and political approaches to ending statelessness are perhaps insufficient for such a complex problem. In this context, many believe that art can be an effective and alternative approach to presenting the complexity of statelessness to a wider audience. An artistic approach may, therefore, be an effective means of addressing the issue of statelessness and creating an environment that ensures justice for stateless persons through empathy, feeling and visualisation. 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Valerie Peay, ‘Humanise’ (Spoken Creative Writing Piece, World Conference on Statelessness and Inclusion (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, 26 June) 27:00 − 28:06 <https://twitter.com/institute_si/status/1144573743424872448>. See Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September 1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960) art 1 (‘1954 Convention’). Universal Declaration of Human Rights, GA Res 217A (III), UN GAOR, 3rd sess, 183rd plen mtg, UN Doc A/810 (10 December 1948) art 15. The Rights of Non-Citizens (Report, UNHCR 2006) 5 <https://www.ohchr.org/documents/publications/noncitizensen.pdf>. Angela M Naimou, ‘Statelessness and the Making of a Decolonial Aesthetics in US Literature’ (DPhil Thesis, Cornell University 2009) 22. ibid 23. See, eg, Nicoletta Enria, ‘Fostering Radical Empathy for Statelessness Using Arts’, European Network on Statelessness (Blog Post, 24 January 2019) <www.statelessness.eu/blog/fostering-radical-empathy-statelessness-using-arts>; Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle, ‘Introduction: Art, Politics, Purpose’ (2009) 35(4) Review of International Studies 775; Lindsey N Kingston, ‘Conceptualizing Statelessness as a Human Rights Challenge: Framing, Visual Representation, and (Partial) Issue Emergence’ (2019) 11(1) Journal of Human Rights Practice 52. 273